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CROWDS 


BOOKS 
By  GERALD  STANLEY  LEE 


THE  LOST  ART  OF  READING 

A  Sketch  of  Civilization 

THE   CHILD   AND   THE   BOOK 

A  Constructive  Criticism  of  Education 

THE   SHADOW    CHRIST 

A  Study  of  the  Hebrew  Men  of  Genius 

THE  VOICE  OF  THE  MACHINES 

An  Introduction  to  the  Twentieth  Century 

INSPIRED    MILLIONAIRES 

A  Study  of  the  Man  of  Genius  in  Business. 

CROWDS 

A  Moving  Picture  of  Democracy 


L 


CROWDS 


A    MOVING-PICTURE 
OF    DEMOCRACY 


BT 


GERALD  STANLEY  LEE 

Editor  qf  "Mount  Tom  " 


IN  FIVE  BOOKS 

CROWDS  AND  ^LACHINES 

LETTING  THE  CROWD  BE  GOOD 

LETTING  THE  CROWD  BE  BEAUTIFUL 

CROWDS  AND  HEROES 

GOOD  NEWS  AND  HARD  WORK 


Gabden  Citt        New  York 
DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  COMPANY 
1916       ,      -^ 


Copyright,  1913,  by 

DOUBLEDAY,    PaGE    &   COMPANT 

All  rights  reserved,  including  that  of 

translation  into  foreign  languages^ 

including  the  Scandinavian 


COPYRIGHT,   1912,  BY  THE   RIDGWAY  COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT,   I9I2,  BY  MITCHELL  XENNERLEY  ' 

COPYRIGHT,    I9I3,   BY  THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY  CO. 

COPYRIGHT,  I9I3,  BY  THE  OUTLOOK  COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT,  I913,  BY  THE  INDEPENDENT  WEEKLY,  INCORPORATED 


CROWDS 

Gratefully  inscribed  to  a  little  Mountain^ 
a  great  Meadow,  and  a  Woman. 

To  the  Mountain  for  the  sense  of  time,  to 
the  Meadow  for  the  sense  of  space,  and 
to  the  Woman  for  the  sense  of  every- 
thing. 


TABLE  OF   CONTENTS 

BOOK  ONE 
CROWDS  AND  MACHINES 


I.    Where  Are  We  Going?         .... 
n.    The  Crowd  Scare         ..... 

III.  The  Machine  Scare      ..... 

IV.  The  Strike  —  an  Invention  for  Making  Crowds 

Think         ....... 

V.    The    Crowd-Man  —  an    Invention    for    Making 
Crowds  See        ...... 

VI. '  The  Imagination  of  Crowds  .... 

VII.    Imagination  About  the  Unseen    . 
VIII.    The  Crowd's  Imagination  About  the  Future 
IX.    The  Crowd's  Imagination  About  People 
X.    A  Democratic  Theory  of  Human  Nature    . 
XI.    Doing  as  One  Would  Wish  One  Had  Done  in 
Twenty  Years  ...... 

XII.    New  Kinds  and  New  Sizes  of  Men     . 


3 

19 
34 

49 

58 
65 
66 
69 

74 
76 

80 
86 


BOOK  TWO 
LETTING  THE  CROWDS  BE  GOOD 

I.  Speaking  as  One  of  the  Crowd  ....      93 

n.  Is  It  Wrong  for  Good  People  to  be  Efficient.?  .       96 

m.  Is  It  Wrong  for  Good  People  to  be  Interesting?    103 

IV.  Prospects  of  the  Liar  .         .         .         .         .107 

V.  Prospects  of  the  Bully        .         .         .         .         .Ill 

VI.  Goodness  as  a  Crowd-Process      .         .         .         .114 

Vn.  Thoughts  on  Being  Improved  by  Other  People.      116 

VIII.  Making  Goodness  Hurry  .         .125 

IX.  Touching  the  Imagination  of  Crowds  .         .     128 


vm 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

X.  The  Stupendous,  the  Unusual,  the  Monotonous 

AND  the  Successful   .... 

XI.  The  Successful    ..... 

XII.  The  Necks  of  the  Wicked  . 

XIII.  Is  It  Wrong  for  Good  People  to  be  Successful.' 

XIV.  Is  It  Second  Rate  for  Good  People  to  be  Success- 

ful.'' ...... 

XV.  The  Successful  Temperament 

XVI.  The  Men  Ahead  Pull 

XVII.  The  Crowds  Push         .... 

XVIII.  The  Man  Who  Says  How,  Says  How 

XIX.  And  the  Machine  Starts!    . 


142 
146 
154 
163 

167 
173 
178 
184 
186 
^200 


I. 

II. 
III. 
IV. 

V. 


I. 

n. 
III. 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 

vn. 
vni. 

IX. 

X. 

XI. 


BOOK  THREE 
LETTING  THE  CROWD  BE  BEAUTIFUL 

Part  I.    Wistful  Millionaires 

Mr.  Carnegie  Speaks  Up  .....  205 
Mr.  Carnegie  Tries  to  Make  People  Read  .  208 
Mr.  Nobel  Tries  to  Make  People  Write  .  .211 
Paper  Books,  Marble  Pillars,  and  Wooden  Boys  221 
The  Humdrum  Factory  and  the  Tumpty-Tum 
Theatre 227 


Part  II.    Iron  Machines 

Steeples  and  Chimneys 

Bells  and  Wheels 

Dew  and  Engines 

Dead  as  a  Door  Nail! 

An  Oxford  Man  and  an  Inch  of  Iron 

The  Machines'  Machines 

The  Men's  Machines   . 

The  Basement  of  the  World 

The  Ground  Floor  Folks    . 

The  Machine-Trainers 

Machines,  Crowd,  and  Artists 


Part  III.    People-Machines 


L  Nowl 


236 
240 
243 
245 
248 
250 
252 
256 
262 
266 
269 


280 


CONTENTS  ix 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

n.    Committees  and  Committees          ....  283 

III.  The  Inconvenience  of  Being  Human  .         .         .  286 

IV.  Letting  the  Crowd  Have  People  in  It        .         .  290 

BOOK  FOUR 
CROWDS  AND  HEROES 

I.    The  Socialist  and  the  Hero        ....  297 

n.    The  Crowd  and  the  Hero   .....  301 

in.    The  Crowd  and  the  Average  Person           .         .  303 

IV.    The  Crowd  and  Pierpont  Morgan       .         .         .  307 

V.    The  Crowd  and  Tom  Mann 313 

VI.    An  Opening  for  the  Next  Pierpont  Morgan      .  323 

VII.    An  Opening  for  the  Next  Tom  Mann          .         .  327 

VIII.    The  Men  Who  Look 331 

IX.    Rules  for  Telling  a  Hero  —  When  One  Sees  One  337 

X.     Who  Is  Afraid.' 343 

XI.    The  Technique  of  Courage          ....  346 
XII.    The  Men  Who  Want  Things        .         .         .         .349 

XIII.  Men  Who  Get  Things 356 

XIV.  Sources  of  Courage  for  Others  —  Toleration      .  364 
XV.    Conversion 371 

XVI.    Exception 380 

XVn.    Invention 383 

XVIII.    The  Man  Who  Pulls  the  World  Together  397 

XIX.    The  Man  Who  Stands  By 400 

XX.    The  Strike  of  the  Saviours         ....  402 

XXI.    The  League  of  the  Men  Who  Are  Not  Afraid          .  404 

BOOK  FIVE 
GOOD  NEWS  AND  HARD  WORK 

Part     I.     News  and  Labour 413 

Part    II.     News  and  Money    .        ."       .        .        .  422 

Part  III.     News  and  Government 
I.     Oxford  Street  and  the  House  of  Commons    .        .431 

XL     Oxford  Street  Hums,  the  House  Hems         .        .  440 


X  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

III.    President  Wilson  and  Moses         ....  449 

rV.    The  President  Says  Yes  and  No  ....  455 

V.     The  President  Says  "Look!" 465 

VI.    The  People  Say  "Who  Are  You?"      ,        .        .469 

VII.    The  People  Say  "  Who  Are  We  ? "        .        .        .  472 

VIII.     News  About  Us  to  the  President         .        .        .  474 

IX.    News-Men 476 

X.    American  Temperament  and  Government    .        .  483 

XI-XII.    News-Books 505-513 

XIII.  Newspapers 517 

XIV.  News-Machines 524 

XV.    News-Crowds 527 

XVI.    Crowd-Men 550 

Epilogue 559 


BOOK  ONE 
CROWDS  AND  MACHINES 

TO   CHRISTOPHER   COLUMBUS 

"A  battered,  wrecked  old  man 
Thrown  on  this  savage  shore  far,  far  from  home. 
Pent  by  the  sea  and  dark  rebellious  brows  twelve  dreary  months 
.     .     .     The  end  I  know  not,  it  is  all  in  Thee, 
Or  small  or  great  I  know  not  —  haply  what  broad  fields,  what 
lands!     .     .     . 

And  these  things  I  see  suddenly,  what  mean  they 
As  if  some  mifacle,  some  hand  divine  unsealed  my  eyeSy 
Shadowy  vast  shapes  smile  through  the  air  and  sky. 
And  on  the  distant  waves  sail  countless  ships. 
And  anthems  in  new  tongues  I  hear  saluting  me.** 


CROWDS 

CHAPTER  I 
WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING? 

THE  best  picture  I  know  of  my  religion  is  Ludgate  Hill  as  one 
sees  it  going  down  the  foot  of  Fleet  Street.  It  would  seem  to 
many  perhaps  like  a  rather  strange  half -heathen  altar,  but  it 
has  in  it  the  three  things  with  which  I  worship  most  my 
Maker  in  this  present  world  —  the  three  things  which  it  would 
be  tlie  breath  of  religion  to  me  to  offer  to  a  God  together  — 
Cathedrals,  Crowds,  and  Machines. 

With  the  railway  bridge  reaching  over,  all  the  little  still 
locomotives  in  the  din  whispering  across  the  street;  with  the 
wide  black  crowd  streaming  up  and  streaming  down,  and  the 
big,  far-away,  other-worldly  church  above,  I  am  strangely  glad. 

It  is  like  having  a  picture  of  one's  whole  world  taken  up  deftly, 

and  done  in  miniature  and  hung  up  for  one  against  the  sky  — 

the  white  steam  which  is  the  breath  of  modern  life,  the  vast 

hurrying  of  our  feet,  and  that  Great  Finger  pointing  toward 

•heaven  day  and  night  for  us  all.     .     .     . 

I  never  tire  of  walking  out  a  moment  from  my  nook  in 
Clifford's  Inn  and  stealing  a  glimpse  and  coming  back  to  my 
fireplace.  I  sit  still  a  moment  before  going  to  work  and  look 
in  the  flames  and  think.  The  great  roar  outside  the  Court 
gathers  it  all  up  —  that  huge,  boundless,  tiny,  summed-up 
world  out  there;  flings  it  faintly  against  my  quiet  windows 
while  I  sit  and  think. 


4  CROWDS 

And  when  one  thinks  of  it  a  minute,  it  sends  one  half -fearfully, 
half-triumphantly  back  to  one's  work  —  the  very  thought  of  it. 
The  Crowd  hurrying,  the  Crowd's  Hurrying  Machines,  and 
the  Crowd's  God,  send  one  back  to  one's  work ! 

In  the  afternoon  I  go  out  again,  slip  my  way  through  the 
crowds  along  the  Strand,  toward  Charing  Cross. 

I  never  tire  of  watching  the  drays,  the  horses,  the  streaming 
taxis,  all  these  little,  fearful,  gliding  crowds  of  men  and  women, 
when  a  little  space  of  street  is  left,  flowing  swiftly,  flowing  like 
globules,  like  mercury,  between  the  cabs. 

But  most  of  all  I  like  looking  up  at  that  vast  second  story 
of  the  street,  coming  in  over  one  like  waves,  like  seas  —  all  these 
happy,  curious  tops  of  'buses;  these  dear,  funny,  way -up  people 
on  benches;  these  world- worshippers,  sight-worshippers,  and 
Americans  —  all  these  little  scurrying  congregations,  hundreds 
of  them,  rolling  past. 

I  sit  on  the  front  seat  of  a  hor«e  'bus  elbow  to  elbow 
with  the  driver,  staring  down  over  the  '  rink  of  the  abyss  upon 
ears'  and  necks  —  that  low,  distant  s  ^  where  the  horses  look 
so  tiny  and  so  ineffectual  and  so  gone-   y  below. 

The  street  is  the  true  path  of  the  sf  .it.  To  walk  through  it, 
or  roll  or  swing  on  top  of  a  bus  throu^a  it  —  the  miles  of  faces, 
all  these  tottering,  toddling,  swinging  miles  of  legs  and  stom- 
achs; and  on  all  sides  of  you,  and  in  the  windows  and  along  the 
walks,  the  things  they  wear,  and  the  things  they  eat,  and  the 
things  they  pour  down  their  little  throats,  and  the  things  they 
pray  to  and  curse  and  worship  and  swindle  in !  It  is  like  being 
out  in  the  middle  of  a  great  ocean  of  living,  or  like  climbing* 
up  some  great  mountain-height  of  people,  their  abysses  and 
their  clouds  about  them,  their  precipices  and  jungles  and 
heavens,  the  great  high  roads  of  their  souls  reaching  off.  .  .  . 
I  can  never  say  why,  but  so  strange  is  it,  so  full  of  awe  is  it,  and 
of  splendour  and  pity,  that  there  are  times  when,  rolling  and 
swinging  along  on  top  of  a  'bus,  with  all  this  strange,  fearful  joy 
of  life  about  me,  within  me  ,  ,  ,  it  is  as  if  on  top  of  my  'bus 


WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING?  5 

I  had  been  far  away  in  some  infinite  place,  and  had  felt  Heaven 
and  Hell  sweep  past. 

One  of  the  first  things  that  strikes  an  American  when  he  slips 
over  from  New  York,  and  finds  himself,  almost  before  he  had 
thought  of  it —  walking  down  the  Strand,  suddenly,  instead  of 
Broadway,  is  the  way  things  —  thousands  of  things  at  once; 
begin  happening  to  him. 

Of  course,  with  all  the  things  that  are  happening  to  him  — 
the  'buses,  the  taxis,  the  Wren  steeples,  the  great  streams  of  new 
sights  in  the  streets,  the  things  that  happen  to  his  eyes  and  to 
his  ears,  to  his  feet  and  his  hands,  and  to  his  body  lunging 
through  the  ground  and  swimming  up  in  space  on  top  of  a  'bus 
through  this  huge,  glorious,  yellow  mist  of  people  .  .  . 
there  are  all  the  things  besides  that  begin  happening  to  his  mind. 

In  New  York,  of  course,  he  rushes  along  through  the  city,  in 
a  kind  of  tunnel  of  his  own  thoughts,  of  his  own  afiFairs,  and 
drives  on  to  his  point,  and  New  York  does  not  —  at  least  it  does 
not  very  often  —  make  things  happen  to  his  mind.  He  is  not 
in  London  five  minutes  before  he  begins  to  notice  how  London 
does  his  thinking  for  him.  The  streets  of  the  city  set  him  to 
thinking,  mile  after  mile,  miles  of  comparing,  miles  of  ex- 
pecting. 

And  above  the  streets  that  he  walks  through  and  drives 
through  he  finds  in  London  another  complete  set  of  streets  that 
interest  him :  the  greater,  silenter  streets  of  England  —  the 
streets  of  people's  thoughts.  And  he  reads  the  great  news- 
papers, those  huge  highways  on  which  the  English  people  are 
really  going  somewhere.  .  .  .  "Where  are  they  going?" 
He  goes  through  the  editorials,  he  stumbles  through  the  news, 
"  Where  are  the  English  people  going?  " 


An  American  thinks  of  the  English  people  in  the  third  person 
—  at  first,  of  course. 

After  three  days  or  so,  he  begins,  half-unconsciously,  slipping 


6  CROWDS 

over  every  now  and  then  into  what  seems  to  be  a  vague,  loose 
first  person  plural. 

Then  the  first  person  plural  grows. 

He  finds  at  last  that  his  thinking  has  settled  down  into  a 
kind  of  happy,  easy-going,  international,  editorial  "We." 
New  York  and  London,  Chicago  and  Sheffield,  go  drifting 
together  through  his  thoughts,  and  even  Paris,  glimmering 
faintly  over  there,  and  a  dim  round  world,  and  he  asks,  as  the 
people  of  a  world  stream  by,  "  Where  are  WE  going?" 

Thus  it  is  that  London,  looming,  teeming,  world-suggesting, 
gets  its  grip  upon  a  man,  a  fresh  American,  and  stretches  him, 
stretches  him  before  his  own  eyes,  makes  him  cosmopohtan, 
does  his  thinking  for  him. 


There  was  a  great  sea  to  still  his  soul  and  lay  down  upon  his 
spirit  that  big,  quiet  roundness  of  the  earth. 

Nothing  is  quite  the  same  after  that  wide  strip  of  sea  — 
sleeping  out  there  alone  night  by  night  —  the  gentle  round 
earth  sloping  away  down  from  under  one  on  both  sides,  in 
the  midst  of  space.  .  .  .  Then,  suddenly,  almost  before 
one  knows,  that  quiet  Space  still  lingering  round  one,  perhaps 
one  finds  oneself  thrust  up  out  of  the  ground  in  the  night  into 
that  big  yellow  roar  of  Trafalgar  Square. 

And  here  are  the  swift  sudden  crowds  of  people,  one's  own 
fellow-men  hurrying  past.  One  looks  into  the  faces  of  the 
people  hurrying  past:  "Where  are  we  going?"  One  looks  at 
the  stars:     "Where  are  we  going?" 


That  night,  when  I  was  thrust  up  out  of  the  ground  and 
stood  dazed  in  the  Square,  I  was  told  in  a  minute  that  this 
London  where  I  was  was  a  besieged  and  conquered  city.  Some 
men  had  risen  up  in  a  day  and  said  to  London:  "No  one  shall 
go  in.     No  one  shall  go  out. " 


WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING?  7 

I  was  in  the  great  proud  city  at  last,  the  capital  of  the  world, 
her  big,  new,  self-assured  inventions  all  about  her,  all  around 
her,  and  soldiers  camping  out  with  her  locomotives ! 

With  her  long  trains  for  endless  belts  of  people  going  in  and 
coming  out,  with  her  air-brakes,  electric  lights,  and  motor-cars 
and  aerial  mails,  it  seemed  passing  strange  to  be  told  that  her 
great  stations  were  all  choked  up  with  a  queer,  funny,  old, 
gone-by,  clanky  piece  of  machinery,  an  invention  for  making 
people  good,  like  soldiers ! 

And  I  stood  in  the  middle  of  the  roar  of  Trafalgar  Square 
and  asked,  as  all  England  was  asking  that  night:  "\Miere  are 
we  going?" 

And  I  looked  in  the  faces  of  the  people  hurrying  past. 

And  nobody  knew. 

And  the  next  day  I  went  through  the  silenter  streets  of  the 
city,  the  great  crowded  dailies  where  all  the  world  troops 
through,  and  then  the  more  quiet  weeklies,  then  the  monthlies, 
more  dignified  and  like  private  parks;  and  the  quarterlies,  too, 
throughtful,  high-minded,  a  little  absent,  now  and  then  a  foot- 
fall passing  through. 

And  I  found  them  all  full  of  the  same  strange  questioning: 
"Where  are  we  going?" 

And  nobody  knew. 

It  was  the  same  questioning  I  had  just  left  in  New  York, 
going  up  all  about  me,  out  of  the  skyscrapers. 

New  York  did  not  know. 

Now  London  did  not  know. 


And  after  I  had  tried  the  journals  and  the  magazines,  I 
thought  of  books. 

I  could  not  but  look  about  —  how  could  I  do  otherwise  than 
look  about?  —  a  lonely  American  walking  at  last  past  all  these 
nobly  haunted  doorways  and  windows  —  for  your  idealists  or 
interpreters,  your  men  who  bring  in  the  sea  upon  your  streets 


8  CROWDS 

and  the  mountains  on  your  roof-tops;  who  still  see  the  wide, 
still  reaches  of  the  souls  of  men  beyond  the  faint  and  tiny  roar 
of  London. 

I  could  not  but  look  for  your  men  of  imagination,  your  poets; 
for  the  men  who  build  the  dreams  and  shape  the  destinies  of 
nations  because  they  mould  their  thoughts. 

I  do  not  like  to  say  it.  How  shall  an  American,  coming  to 
you  out  of  his  long,  flat,  literary  desert,  dare  to  say  it.^^  .  .  . 
Here,  where  Shakespeare  played  mightily,  and  like  a  great  boy 
with  the  world;  where  Milton,  Keats,  Wordsworth,  Browning, 
Shelley,  and  even  Dickens  flooded  the  lives  and  refreshed  the 
hearts  of  the  people;  here,  in  these  selfsame  streets,  going  past 
these  same  old,  gentle,  smoky  temples  where  Charles  Lamb 
walked  and  loved  a  world,  and  laughed  at  a  world,  and  even 
made  one  —  lifted  over  his  London  forever  into  the  hearts 
of  men.     .     .     . 

I  can  only  say  what  I  saw  those  first  few  fresh  days:  John 
Galsworthy  out  with  his  camera  —  his  beautiful,  sad,  foggy 
camera;  Arnold  Bennett  stitching  and  stitching  faithfully 
twenty -four  hours  a  day — big,  curious  tapestries  of  little  things; 
H.  G.  Wells,  with  his  retorts,  his  experiments  about  him,  his 
pots  and  kettles  of  humanity  in  a  great  stew  of  steam,  half- 
hopeful,  half -dismayed,  mixing  up  his  great,  new,  queer  messes 
of  human  nature;  and  (when  I  could  look  up  again)  G.  K. 
Chesterton,  divinely  swearing,  chanting,  gloriously  contra- 
dicting, rolled  lustily  through  the  wide,  sunny  spaces  of  His 
Own  Mind;  and  Bernard  Shaw  (all  civilization  trooping  by), 
the  eternal  boy,  on  the  eternal  curbstone  of  the  world,  threw 
stones;  and  the  Bishop  of  Birmingham  preached  a  fine, 
helpless  sermon.     .     .     . 


When  a  new  American,  coming  from  his  own  big,  hurried, 
formless,  speechless  country,  finds  himself  in  what  he  had 
always  supposed  to  be  this  trim,  arranged,  grown-up,  articulate 


WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING?  9 

England,  and  when,  thrust  up  out  of  the  ground  in  Trafalgar 
Square,  he  finds  himself  looking  at  that  vast  yellow  mist  of 
people,  that  vast  bewilderment  of  faces,  of  the  poor,  of  the 
rich,  coming  and  going  they  cannot  say  where  —  he  naturally 
thinks  at  first  it  must  be  because  they  cannot  speak;  and  when 
he  looks  to  those  who  speak  for  them,  to  their  writers  or  inter- 
preters, and  when  he  finds  that  they  are  bewildered,  that  they 
are  asking  the  same  question  over  and  over  that  we  in  America 
are  asking  too,  "Where  are  we  going?"  he  is  brought  abruptly 
up,  front  to  front  with  the  great  broadside  of  modern  life. 
London,  his  last  resort,  is  as  bewildered  as  New  York;  and  so, 
at  last,  here  it  is.  It  has  to  be  faced  now  and  here,  as  if  it  were 
some  great  scare-head  or  bill-board  on  the  world,  "Where 

ARE  WE  GOING?" 


The  most  stupendous  feat  for  the  artist  or  man  of  imagination 
in  modern  times  is  to  conceive  a  picture  or  vision  for  our 
Society  —  our  present  machine-civilization  —  a  common  expec- 
tation for  people  which  will  make  them  want  to  live. 

If  Leonardo  were  living  now,  he  would  probably  slight  for 
the  time  being  his  building  bridges,  and  skimp  his  work  on 
Mona  Lisa,  and  write  a  book  —  an  exultant  book  about  com- 
mon people.  He  would  focus  and  express  democracy  as  only 
the  great  and  true  aristocrat  or  genius  or  artist  will  ever  do  it. 
A  great  society  must  be  expressed  as  a  vision  or  expectation 
before  men  can  see  it  together,  and  go  to  work  on  it  together, 
and  make  it  a  fact.  What  makes  a  society  great  is  that  it  is 
full  of  people  who  have  something  to  live  for  and  who  know 
what  it  is.  It  is  because  nobody  knows,  now,  that  our  present 
society  is  not  great.  The  different  kinds  of  people  in  it  have  not 
made  up  their  minds  what  they  are  for,  and  some  kinds  have 
particularly  failed  to  make  up  their  minds  what  the  other 
kinds  are  for. 

We  are  all  making  our  particular  contribution  to  the  common 


10  CROWDS 

vision,  and  some  of  us  are  able  to  say  in  one  way  and  some 
in  another  what  this  vision  is;  but  it  is  going  to  take  a  supreme 
cathoHc,  summing-up  individualist,  a  great  man  or  artist  — 
a  man  who  is  all  of  us  in  one  —  to  express  for  Crowds,  and  for 
all  of  us  together,  where  we  want  to  go,  what  we  think  we  are 
for,  and  what  kind  of  a  world  we  want. 

This  will  have  to  be  done  first  in  a  book.  The  modern  world 
is  collecting  its  thoughts.     It  is  trying  to  write  its  bible. 

The  Bible  of  the  Hebrews  (which  had  to  be  borrowed  by  the 
rest  of  the  world  if  they  were  to  have  one)  is  the  one  great 
outstanding  fact  and  result  of  the  Hebrew  genius.  They  did 
not  produce  a  civilization,  but  they  produced  a  book  for  the 
rest  of  the  world  to  make  civilizations  out  of,  a  book  which  has 
made  all  other  nations  the  moral  passengers  of  the  Hebrews  for 
two  thousand  years. 

And  the  whole  spirit  and  aim  of  this  book,  the  thing  about 
it  that  made  it  great,  was  that  it  was  the  sublimest,  most 
persistent,  most  colossal,  masterful  attempt  ever  made  by 
men  to  look  forth  upon  the  earth,  to  see  all  the  men  in  it, 
like  spirits  hurrying  past,  and  to  answer  the  question,  "Where 

ARE  WE  GOING.'* " 

I  would  not  have  any  one  suppose  that  in  these  present 
tracings  and  outlines  of  thought  I  am  making  an  attempt  to 
look  upon  the  world  and  say  where  the  people  are  going,  and 
where  they  think  they  are  going,  and  where  they  want  to  go. 
I  have  attempted  to  find  out,  and  put  down  what  might  seem 
at  first  sight  (at  least  it  did  to  me)  the  answer  to  a  very  small 
and  unimportant  question  —  "Where  is  it  that  I  really  want 
to  go  myself?"  "What  kind  of  a  world  is  it,  all  the  facts  about 
me  being  duly  considered,  I  really  want  to  be  in?" 

No  man  living  in  a  world  as  interesting  as  this  ever  writes 
a  book  if  he  can  help  it.  If  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  or  Mr.  Chester- 
ton or  Mr.  Wells  had  been  so  good  as  to  write  a  book  for  me  in 
which  they  had  given  the  answer  to  my  question,  in  which  they 
had  said  more  or  less  authoritatively  for  me  what  kind  of  a 


WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING?  11 

world  it  is  that  I  want  to  be  in,  this  book  would  never  have  been 
written.  The  book  is  not  put  forward  as  an  attempt  to  arrange 
a  world,  or  as  a  system  or  a  chart,  or  as  a  nation-machine,  or 
even  as  an  argument.  The  one  thing  that  any  one  can  fairly 
claim  for  this  book  is  that  one  man's  life  has  been  saved  with  it. 
It  is  the  record  of  one  man  fighting  up  through  story  after  story 
of  crowds  and  of  crowds'  machines  to  the  great  steel  and  iron 
floor  on  the  top  of  the  world,  until  he  had  found  the  manliole 
in  it,  and  broken  through  and  caught  a  breath  of  air  and  looked 
at  the  light.  The  book  is  merely  a  life-preserver  —  that  is  all; 
and  one  man's  life-preserver.  Perhaps  the  man  is  representa- 
tive, and  perhaps  he  is  not.  At  all  events,  here  it  is.  Anybody 
else  who  can  use  it  is  welcome  to  it. 


The  first  and  most  practical  step  in  getting  what  one  wants 
in  this  world  is  wanting  it.  One  would  think  that  the  next  step 
would  be  expressing  what  one  wants.  But  it  almost  never  is. 
It  generally  consists  in  wanting  it  still  harder  and  still  harder 
until  one  can  express  it. 

This  is  particularly  true  when  the  thing  one  wants  is  a  new 
world.  Here  are  all  these  other  people  who  have  to  be  asked. 
And  until  one  wants  it  hard  enough  to  say  it,  to  get  it  outside 
one's  self,  possibly  make  it  catching,  nothing  happens. 

If  one  were  to  point  out  one  trait  rather  than  another  that 
makes  Bernard  Shaw,  for  so  brilliant  a  man,  so  ineffective  as  a 
leader,  or  literary  statesman,  or  social  reformer,  it  would  be  his 
modesty.     He  has  never  wanted  anything. 

If  I  could  have  found  a  book  by  Bernard  Shaw  in  which 
Mr.  Shaw  had  merely  said  what  he  wanted  himself,  it  is  quite 
possible  this  book  would  not  have  been  written.  Even  if 
Mr.  Shaw,  without  saying  what  he  wanted,  had  ever  shown  in 
any  corner  of  any  book  that  one  man's  wanting  something  in 
this  world  amounted  to  anything,  or  could  make  any  one 
else  want  it,  or  could    make   any   difference   in   him    or  in 


12  CROWDS 

the  world  around  him,  perhaps  I  would  not  have  written  this 
book. 

Everywhere,  as  I  have  looked  about  me  among  the  bookmen 
in  America,  in  England,  I  have  found,  not  the  things  that  they 
wanted  in  their  books,  but  always  these  same  deadly  lists  or 
bleak  inventories  —  these  prairies  of  things  that  they  did  not 
want. 

Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  I  knew  already,  with  an  almost 
despairing  distinctness,  nearly  all  these  things  I  did  not  want 
and  it  has  not  helped  me  (with  all  due  courtesy  and  admiration) 
having  John  Galsworthy  out  photographing  them  day  after  day. 
so  that  I  merely  did  not  want  them  harder.  And  Mr.  Wells's 
measles  and  children's  diseases,  too.  I  knew  already  that 
I  did  not  want  them.  And  Mr.  Shaw's  entire,  heroic,  almost 
noble  collection  of  things  he  does  not  want  does  not  supply  me 
—  nor  could  it  supply  any  other  man  with  furniture  to  make 
a  world  with  —  even  if  it  were  not  this  real,  big  world,  with 
rain  and  sunshine  and  wind  and  people  in  it,  and  were  only 
that  little,  wonderful  world  a  man  lives  within  his  own  heart. 
There  have  been  times,  and  there  will  be  more  of  them,  when 
I  could  not  otherwise  than  speak  as  the  champion  of  Bernard 
Shaw;  but,  after  all,  what  single  piece  of  furniture  is  there  that 
George  Bernard  Shaw,  living  with  his  great  attic  of  not-things 
all  around  him,  is  able  to  offer  to  furnish  me  for  me  single,  little, 
warm,  lighted  room  to  keep  my  thoughts  in?  Nor  has  he 
furnished  me  with  one  thing  with  which  I  would  care  to  sit 
down  in  my  little  room  and  think  —  looking  into  the  cold, 
perfect  hygienic  ashes  he  has  left  upon  my  hearth.  Even  if 
I  were  a  revolutionist,  and  not  a  mere,  plain  human  being, 
loving  life  and  wanting  to  live  more  abundantly,  I  am  bound 
to  say  I  do  not  see  what  there  is  in  Mr.  Galsworthy's  photo- 
graphs, or  in  Mr.  Wells's  rich,  bottomless  murk  of  humanity 
to  make  a  revolution  for.  And  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  with  all  his 
bottles  of  disinfectants  and  shelves  of  sterilized  truths,  his  hard 
well-being  and  his  glittering  comforts,  has  presented  the  vision 


WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING?  13 

of  a  world  in  which  at  the  very  best  —  even  if  it  all  comes  out  as 
he  says  it  will  —  a  man  would  merely  have  things  without 
wanting  them,  and  without  wanting  anything. 


And  so  it  has  seemed  to  me  that  even  if  he  is  quite  unimpor- 
tant, any  man  to-day  who,  in  some  public  place,  like  a  book, 
ihall  paint  the  picture  of  his  heart's  desire,  who  shall  throw  up, 
as  upon  a  screen,  where  aU  men  may  see  them,  his  most  im- 
mediate and  most  pressing  ideals,  would  perform  an  important 
service.  If  a  man's  sole  interest  were  to  find  out  what  all  men 
in  the  world  want,  the  best  way  to  do  it  would  be  for  him  to 
say  quite  definitely,  so  that  we  could  all  compare  notes,  what 
he  wanted  himself.  Speaking  for  a  planet  has  gone  by,  but 
possibly,  if  a  few  of  us  but  speak  for  ourselves,  the  planet  will 
talk  back,  and  we  shall  find  out  at  last  what  it  really  is  that 
it  wants. 

The  thing  that  many  of  us  want  most  in  the  present  grayness 
and  din  of  the  world  is  some  one  to  play  with,  or  if  the  word 
"play"  is  not  quite  the  right  word,  some  one  with  whom  we  can 
work  with  freedom  and  self-expressiveness  and  joy.  Nine 
men  out  of  ten  one  meets  to-day  talk  with  one  as  it  were  with 
their  watches  in  their  hands.  The  people  who  are  rich  one 
sees  everywhere,  being  run  away  with  by  their  motor-cars; 
and  the  people  who  are  poor  one  sees  struggling  pitifully 
and  for  their  very  souls,  under  great  wheels  and  beneath 
machines. 

Of  course,  I  can  only  speak  for  myself.  I  do  not  deny  that 
a  little  while  at  a  time  I  can  sit  by  a  brook  in  the  woods  and  be 
happy;  but  if,  as  it  happens,  I  would  rather  have  other  people 
about  me  —  people  who  do  not  spoil  things,  I  find  that  the 
machines  about  me  everywhere  have  made  most  people  very 
strange  and  pathetic  in  the  woods.  They  cannot  sit  by  brooks, 
many  of  them;  and  when  they  come  out  to  the  sky,  it  looks  to 
them  like  some  mere,  big,  blue  lead  roof  up  over  their  lives. 


14  CROWDS 

Perhaps  I  am  selfish  about  it,  but  I  cannot  bear  to  see  people 
looking  at  the  sky  in  this  way.     .     .     . 


So,  as  I  have  watched  ray  fellow  human  beings,  what  I  have 
come  to  want  most  of  all  in  this  world  is  the  inspired  employer 
—  or  what  I  have  called  the  inspired  millionaire  or  organizer; 
the  man  who  can  take  the  machines  off  the  backs  of  the  people 
and  take  the  machines  out  of  their  wits,  and  make  the  machines 
free  their  bodies  and  serve  their  souls. 

If  we  ever  have  the  inspired  employer,  he  will  have  to  be 
made  by  the  social  imagination  of  the  people,  by  creating  the 
spirit  of  expectation  and  challenge  toward  the  rich  among  the 
masses  of  the  people. 

I  believe  that  the  time  has  come  when  the  world  is  to  make 
its  last  stand  for  idealism,  great  men,  and  crowds. 

I  believe  that  great  men  can  be  really  great,  that  they  can 
represent  crowds.  I  believe  that  crowds  can  be  really  great, 
that  they  can  know  great  men. 

The  most  natural  kind  of  great  man  for  crowds  to  know  first 
will  probably  be  a  kind  of  everyday  great  man  or  business 
statesman,  the  man  who  represents  all  classes,  and  who  proves 
it  in  the  way  he  conducts  his  business. 

I  have  called  this  man  the  Crowdman. 

I  do  not  say  that  I  have  met  precisely  the  type  of  inspired 
millionaire  I  have  in  mind,  but  I  have  known  scores  of  men 
who  have  reminded  me  of  him  and  of  what  he  is  going  to  be,  and 
I  am  prepared  to  say  that  in  spirit,  or  latent  at  least,  he  is  all 
about  me  in  the  world  to-day.  If  it  is  proved  to  me  that  no 
such  man  exists,  I  am  here  to  say  there  will  be  one.  If  it  is 
proved  to  me  that  there  cannot  be  one,  /  vdll  make  one.  If  it  is 
proved  to  me  that  by  lifting  up  Desire  in  the  faces  of  young  men 
and  of  boys,  and  in  the  faces  of  true  fathers  and  young  mothers, 
and  by  ringing  up  my  challenge  on  the  great  doors  of  the  schools, 
I  cannot  make  one,  then  I  will  invoke  the  men  that  shall  write 


WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING?  15 

the  books,  that  shall  sing  the  songs  that  shall  make  one !  I  say 
this  with  all  reverence  for  other  men's  desires  and  with  all 
respect  for  natural  prejudgments.  As  I  have  conceived  it, 
the  one  business  of  the  world  to-day  is  to  find  out  what  we  are 
for  and  to  find  out  what  men  in  the  world  —  on  the  whole  — 
really  want.  When  men  know  what  they  want  they  get  it. 
Every  wrong  thing  we  have  to  face  in  modern  industrial  life 
is  due  to  men  who  know  what  they  want,  and  who  therefore  get 
it,  due  to  the  passions  and  the  dreams  of  men;  and  the  one 
single  way  in  which  these  wrong  things  will  ever  be  overcome  is 
with  more  passions  and  with  more  and  mightier  dreams  of  men. 

Nothing  is  more  visionary  than  trying  to  run  a  world  without 
dreams,  especially  an  economic  world.  It  is  because  even  bad 
dreams  are  better  in  this  world  than  having  no  dreams  at  all 
that  bad  people  so  called  are  so  largely  allowed  to  run  it. 

In  the  final  and  practical  sense,  the  one  factor  in  economics 
to  be  reckoned  with  is  Desire. 

The  next  move  in  economics  is  going  to  be  the  statement  of 
a  shrewd,  dogged,  realizable  ideal.  It  is  only  ideals  that  have 
aroused  the  wrong  passions,  and  it  is  only  ideals  that  will  arouse 
the  right  ones. 

It  will  have  to  be,  I  imagine,  when  it  comes,  not  a  mere 
statement  of  principles,  an  analysis,  or  a  criticism,  but  a  moving- 
picture,  a  portrait  of  the  human  race,  that  shall  reveal  man's 
heart  to  himself.  What  we  want  is  a  vast  white  canvas, 
spread,  as  it  were,  over  the  end  of  the  world,  before  which  we 
shall  all  sit  together,  the  audience  of  the  nations,  of  the  poor, 
of  the  rich,  as  in  some  still,  thoughtful  place  —  all  of  us 
together;  and  then  we  will  throw  up  before  us  on  the  vast 
white  screen  in  the  dark  the  vivid  picture  of  our  vast  desires, 
flame  up  upon  it  the  hopes,  the  passions  of  human  lives,  and 
the  grim,  silent  wills  of  men.  "What  do  we  want?"  "Where 
are  we  going?" 

In  place  of  the  literature  of  criticism  we  have  come  now  to 
the  literature  of  Desire. 


16  CROWDS 

This  literature  will  have  to  come  slowly,  and  I  have  come 
to  believe  that  the  first  book,  when  it  comes,  will  be  perhaps  a 
book  that  does  not  prove  anything,  a  book  that  is  a  mere  cry, 
a  prayer,  or  challenge;  the  story  of  what  one  man  with  these 
streetfuls  of  the  faces  of  men  and  the  faces  of  women  pouring 
their  dullness  and  pouring  their  weariness  over  him,  has  desired, 
and  of  what,  God  helping  him,  he  will  have. 

There  is  a  certain  sense  in  which  merely  praying  to  God 
has  gone  by.  In  the  present  desperate  crisis  of  a  world  plung- 
ing on  in  the  dark  to  a  catastrophe  or  a  glory  that  we  cannot 
guess,  it  is  a  time  for  men  to  pray  a  prayer,  a  standing-up 
prayer,  to  one  another. 

I  believe  that  it  is  going  to  be  this  huge  gathering-in  of 
public  desire,  this  imperious  challenge  of  what  men  want, 
this  standing-up  prayer  of  men  to  one  another,  which  alone 
shall  make  men  go  forth  with  faith  and  singing  once  more 
into  the  battle  of  life.  Sometimes  it  has  seemed  to  me  I  have 
already  heard  it  —  this  song  of  men's  desires  about  me  — 
faintly.  But  I  have  seen  that  the  time  is  at  hand  when  it 
shall  come  as  a  vast  chorus  of  cities,  of  fields,  of  men's  voices, 
filling  the  dome  of  the  world  —  a  chorus  in  the  glory  and  the 
shame  of  which  no  millionaire  who  merely  wants  to  make 
money,  no  artist  who  is  not  expressing  the  souls  and  freeing  the 
bodies  of  men,  no  statesman  who  is  not  gathering  up  the  desires 
of  crowds,  and  going  daily  through  the  world  hewing  out 
the  will  of  the  people,  shall  dare  to  live. 


But  while  this  is  the  vision  of  my  belief,  I  would  not  have  any 
one  suppose  that  I  am  the  bearer  of  easy  and  gracious  tidings. 

It  is  rather  of  a  great  daily  adventure  one  has  with  the 
world. 

There  have  been  times  when  it  seemed  as  if  it  had  to  begin 
all  over  again  every  morning. 


WHERE  ARE  WE  GOING?  17 

Day  by  day  I  walk  down  Fleet  Street  toward  Ludgate  Hill. 

I  look  once  more  every  morning  at  that  great  picture  of 
my  religion;  I  look  at  the  quiet,  soaring,  hopeful  dome  —  that 
little  touch  of  singing  or  praying  that  men  have  lifted  up 
against  heaven.     "Will  the  Dome  bring  the  Man  to  me?" 

I  look  up  at  the  machines,  strange  and  eager,  hurrying 
across  the  bridge.     "  Will  the  Machines  bring  the  Man  to  me?  " 

I  look  in  the  faces  of  the  crowd  hurrying  past.  "Will  the 
Crowd  bring  the  Man  to  me?" 

With  the  picture  of  my  religion  —  or  perhaps  three  religions 
or  three  stories  of  religion  —  I  walk  on  and  on  through  the 
crowd,  past  the  railway,  past  the  Cathedral,  past  the  Mansion 
House,  and  over  the  Tower  Bridge.  I  walk  fast  and  eagerly 
and  blindly,  as  though  a  man  would  walk  away  from  the 
world. 

Suddenly  I  find  myself,  throngs  of  voices  all  about  me, 
standing  half -unconsciously  by  a  high  iron  fence  in  Bermondsey 
watching  that  smooth  asphalt  playground  where  one  sees  the 
very  dead  (for  once)  crowded  by  the  living  —  pushed  over  to 
the  edges  —  their  gravestones  tilted  calmly  up  against  the 
walls.  I  stand  and  look  through  the  pickets  and  watch  the 
children  run  and  shout  —  the  little  funny,  mockingly  dressed, 
frowzily  frumpily  happy  children,  the  stored-up  sunshine  of 
a  thousand  years  all  shining  faintly  out  through  the  dirt,  out 
through  the  generations  in  their  little  faces  —  "Will  the  INIan 
come  to  me  out  of  these?  " 

The  tombstones  lean  against  the  wall  and  the  children  run 
and  shout.  As  I  watch  them  with  my  hopes  and  fears  and  the 
tombstones  tilted  against  the  walls  —  as  I  peer  through  the 
railings  at  the  children,  I  face  my  three  religions.  A\Tiat 
will  the  three  religions  do  with  the  children?  \^^lat  will 
the  children  do  with  the  three  religions? 

And  now  I  will  tell  the  truth.  I  will  not  cheat  nor  run 
away  as  sometimes  I  seem  to  have  tried  to  do  for  years.  I 
J  will  no  longer  let  myself  be  tricked  by  the  mere  glamour  and 


18  CROWDS 

bigness  of  our  modern  life  nor  swooned  into  good-will  by  the 
roll  and  liturgy  of  revolution,  "of  the  people,"  "for  the  people," 
"by  the  people,"  nor  will  I  be  longer  awed  by  those  huge 
phrase-idols,  constitutions,  routines,  that  have  roared  around 
me  "Liberty,  Equality,  Fraternity"  —  those  imperious 
thoughtless,  stupid  tra-la-las  of  the  People.  Do  the  People 
see  truth?  Can  the  People  see  truth?  Can  all  the  crowd,  and 
can  all  the  machines,  and  all  the  cathedrals  piled  up  together 
produce  the  Man,  the  Crowd-man  or  great  man  who  sees  truth? 

And  so  with  my  three  religions,  I  have  three  fears,  one 
for  each  of  them.  There  is  the  Machine  fear,  lest  the  crowd 
should  be  overswept  by  its  machines  and  become  like  them; 
and  the  Crowd  fear,  lest  the  crowd  should  overlook  its  mighty 
innumerable  and  personal  need  of  great  men;  and  there  is  also 
the  daily  fear  for  the  Church,  lest  the  Church  should  not 
understand  crowds  and  machines  and  grapple  with  crowds 
and  machines,  interpret  them  and  glory  in  them  and  appropriate 
them  for  her  own  use  and  for  God's  —  lest  the  Church  should 
turn  away  from  the  crowds  and  the  machines  and  graciously 
and  idly  bow  down  to  Herself. 

And  now  I  am  going  to  try  to  express  these  three  fears  that 
go  with  the  three  religions  as  well  as  I  can,  so  that  I  can  turn 
on  them  and  face  them  and,  God  helping  me,  look  them  out 
of  countenance. 


CHAPTER  n 
THE    CROWD    SCARE 

TIME  was  when  a  man  was  born  upon  this  planet  in  a 
somewhat  lonely  fashion.  A  few  human  beings  out  of  all  in- 
finity stood  by  to  care  for  him.  He  was  brought  up  with  hills 
and  stars  and  a  neighbour  or  so,  until  he  grew  to  man's  estate. 
He  chmbed  at  last  over  the  farthest  hill,  and  there,  on  the  rim 
of  things,  standing  on  the  boimdary  line  of  sky  and  earth 
that  had  always  been  the  edge  of  life  to  him  before,  he  looked 
forth  upon  the  freedom  of  the  world,  and  said  in  his  soul, 
"What  shall  I  be  in  this  world  I  see,  and  whither  shall  I  go  in 
it?"  And  the  sky  and  the  earth  and  the  rivers  and  the  seas 
and  the  nights  and  the  days  beckoned  to  him,  and  the  voices 
of  life  rose  around  him,  and  they  all  said,  "Come!" 

On  a  corner  in  New  York,  around  a  Street  Department 
wagon,  not  so  very  long  ago,  five  thousand  men  were  fighting 
for  shovels,  fifty  men  to  a  shovel  —  a  tool  for  living  a  little 
longer. 

The  problem  of  living  in  this  modem  world  is  the  problem 
of  finding  room  in  it.  The  crowd  principle  is  so  universally 
at  work  through  modem  life  that  the  geography  of  the  world 
has  been  changed  to  conform  to  it.  We  live  in  crowds.  We 
get  our  living  in  crowds.  We  are  amused  in  herds.  Civiliza- 
tion is  a  list  of  cities.  Cities  are  the  huge  central  dynamos  of 
all  being.  The  power  of  a  man  can  be  measured  to-day  by 
the  mile,  the  number  of  miles  between  him  and  the  city;  that 
is,  between  him  and  what  the  city  stands  for  —  the  centre 
of  mass. 

The  crowd  principle  is  the  first  principle  of  production. 

19 


20  CROWDS 

The  producer  who  can  get  the  most  men  together  and  the 
most  dollars  together  controls  the  market;  and  when  he  once 
controls  the  market,  instead  of  merely  getting  the  most  men 
and  the  most  dollars,  he  can  get  all  the  men  and  all  the  dollars. 
Hence  the  corporation  in  production. 

The  crowd  principle  is  the  first  principle  of  distribution. 
The  man  who  can  get  the  most  men  to  buy  a  particular  thing 
from  him  can  buy  the  most  of  it,  and  therefore  buy  it  the  cheap- 
est, and  therefore  get  more  men  to  buy  from  him;  and  having 
bought  this  particular  thing  cheaper  than  all  men  could  buy 
it,  it  is  only  a  step  to  selling  it  to  all  men;  and  then,  having  all 
the  men  on  one  thing  and  all  the  dollars  on  one  thing,  he  is 
able  to  buy  other  things  for  nothing,  for  everybody,  and  sell 
them  for  a  little  more  than  nothing  to  everybody.  Hence 
the  department  store  —  the  syndicate  of  department  stores  — 
the  crowd  principle  in  commerce. 

The  value  of  a  piece  of  land  is  the  number  of  footsteps 
passing  by  it  in  twenty -four  hours.  The  value  of  a  railroad 
is  the  number  of  people  near  it  who  cannot  keep  still.  If 
there  are  a  great  many  of  these  people,  the  railroad  runs  its 
trains  for  them.  If  there  are  only  a  few,  though  they  be  heroes 
and  prophets,  Dantes,  Savonarolas,  and  George  Washingtons, 
trains  shall  not  be  run  for  them.  The  railroad  is  the  char- 
acteristic property  and  symbol  of  property  in  this  modern 
age,  and  the  entire  value  of  a  railroad  depends  upon  its  getting 
control  of  a  crowd  —  either  a  crowd  that  wants  to  be  where 
some  other  crowd  is,  or  a  crowd  that  wants  a  great  many  tons 
of  something  that  some  other  crowd  has. 

When  we  turn  from  commerce  to  philosophy,  we  find  the 
same  principle  running  through  them  both.  The  main  thing 
in  the  philosophy  of  to-day  is  the  extraordinary  emphasis  of 
environment  and  heredity.  A  man's  destiny  is  the  way  the 
crowd  of  his  ancestors  ballot  for  his  life.  His  soul  —  if  he 
has  a  soul  —  is  an  atom  acted  upon  by  a  majority  of  other 
atoms. 


THE  CROWD  SCARE  21 

When  we  turn  to  religion  in  its  different  phases,  we  find 
the  same  emphasis  upon  them  all  —  the  emphasis  of  mass,  of 
majority.  Not  that  the  church  exists  for  the  masses  —  no 
one  claims  this  —  but  that,  such  as  it  is,  it  is  a  mass  church. 
While  the  promise  of  Scripture,  as  a  last  resort,  is  often  heard 
in  the  church  about  two  or  three  gathered  together  in  God's 
name,  the  Church  is  run  on  the  working  conviction  that  unless 
the  minister  and  the  elders  can  gather  two  or  three  hundred 
in  God's  name.  He  will  not  pay  any  particular  attention  to 
them,  or,  if  He  does.  He  will  not  pay  the  bills.  The  church  of 
our  forefathers,  founded  on  personality,  is  exchanged  for  the 
church  of  democracy,  founded  on  crowds;  and  the  church 
of  the  moment  is  the  institutional  church,  in  which  the  stand- 
ing of  the  clergyman  is  exchanged  for  the  standing  of  the 
congregation.  The  inevitable  result,  the  crowd  clergyman, 
is  seen  on  every  hand  amongst  us  —  the  agent  of  an  audience, 
who,  instead  of  telling  an  audience  what  they  ought  to  do, 
runs  errands  for  them  morning  and  noon  and  night.  With 
coddling  for  majorities  and  tact  for  whims,  he  carefully  picks 
his  way.  He  does  his  people  as  much  good  as  they  will  let  him, 
tells  them  as  much  truth  as  they  will  hear,  until  he  dies  at  last, 
and  goes  to  take  his  place  with  Puritan  parsons  who  mastered 
majorities,  with  martyrs  who  would  not  live  and  be  mastered 
by  majorities,  and  with  apostles  who  managed  to  make  a 
new  world  without  the  help  of  majorities  at  all. 

Theology  reveals  the  same  tendency.  The  measuring  by 
numbers  is  found  in  all  belief,  the  same  cringing  before  masses 
of  little  facts  instead  of  conceiving  the  few  immeasurable  ones. 
Helpless  individuals  mastered  by  crowds  are  bound  to  believe 
in  a  kind  of  infinitely  helpless  God.  He  stands  in  the  midst 
of  the  crowds  of  His  laws  and  the  systems  of  His  worlds:  to 
those  who  are  not  religious,  a  pale  First  Cause;  and  to  those 
who  are,  a  Great  Sentimentality  far  away  in  the  heavens, 
who,  in  a  kind  of  vast  weak-mindedness  (a  Puritan  would 
say),     seems    to    want    everybody    to    be    good    and    hopes 


22  CROWDS 

they  will,  but  does  not  quite  know  what  to  do  about  it  if  they 
are  not. 

Every  age  has  its  typical  idea  of  heaven  and  its  typical  idea 
of  hell  (in  some  of  them  it  would  be  hard  to  tell  which  is  which) , 
and  every  civilization,  has  its  typical  idea  of  God.  A  civiliza- 
tion with  sovereign  men  in  it  has  a  sovereign  God;  and  a  crowd 
civilization,  reflecting  its  mood  on  the  heavens,  is  inclined  to  a 
pleasant,  large-minded  God,  eternally  considering  everybody 
and  considering  everything,  but  ineflficient  withal,  a  kind  of 
legislature  of  Deity,  typical  of  representative  institutions  at 
their  best  and  at  their  worst. 

If  we  pass  from  our  theology  to  our  social  science  we  come 
to  the  most  characteristic  result  of  the  crowd  principle  that 
the  times  afford.  We  are  brought  face  to  face  with  Socialism, 
the  millennium  machine,  the  Corliss  engine  of  progress.  It 
were  idle  to  deny  to  the  Socialist  that  he  is  right  —  and  more 
right,  indeed,  than  most  of  us,  in  seeing  that  there  is  a  great 
wrong  somewhere;  but  it  would  be  impossible  beyond  this 
point  to  make  any  claim  for  him,  except  that  he  is  honestly 
trying  to  create  in  the  world  a  wrong  we  do  not  have  as  yet, 
that  shall  be  large  enough  to  swallow  the  wrong  we  have.  The 
term  "Socialism"  stands  for  many  things,  in  its  present  state; 
but  so  far  as  the  average  Socialist  is  concerned,  he  may  be 
defined  as  an  idealist  who  turns  to  materialism,  that  is,  to 
mass,  to  carry  his  idealism  out.  The  world  having  discovered 
two  great  ideals  in  the  New  Testament,  the  service  of  all  men 
by  all  other  men,  and  the  infinite  value  of  the  individual,  the 
Socialist  expects  to  carry  out  one  of  these  ideals  by  destroying 
the  other. 

The  principle  that  an  infinitely  helpful  society  can  be  pro- 
duced by  setting  up  a  row  of  infinitely  helpless  individuals 
is  Socialism,  as  the  average  Socialist  practises  it.  The  average 
Socialist  is  the  type  of  the  eager  but  elBFeminate  reformer  of  all 
ages,  because  he  seeks  to  gain  by  machinery  things  nine  tenths 
of  the  value  of  which  to  men  is  in  gaining  them  for  themselves. 


THE  CROWD  SCARE  23 

Socialism  is  the  attempt  to  invent  conveniences  for  heroes, 
to  pass  a  law  that  will  make  being  a  man  unnecessary,  to  do 
away  with  sin  by  framing  a  world  in  which  it  would  be  worthless 
to  do  right  because  it  would  be  impossible  to  do  wrong.  It  is 
a  philosophy  of  helplessness,  which,  even  if  it  succeeds  in 
helplessly  carrying  its  helplessness  out  —  in  doing  away  with 
suffering,  for  instance  —  can  only  do  it  by  bringing  to  pass  a 
man  not  alive  enough  to  be  capable  A  suffering,  and  putting 
him  in  a  world  where  suffering  and  joy  alike  would  be  a  bore 
to  him. 

But  the  main  importance  of  Socialism  in  this  connection 
lies  in  the  fact  that  it  does  not  confine  itself  to  sociology. 
It  has  become  a  complete  philosophy  of  life,  and  can  be  seen 
penetrating  with  its  subtle  satire  on  human  nature  almost 
everything  about  us.  We  have  the  cash  register  to  educate 
our  clerks  into  pure  and  honest  character,  and  the  souls  of 
conductors  can  be  seen  being  nurtured,  mile  after  mile,  by  fare- 
recorders.  Corporations  buy  consciences  by  the  gross.  They 
are  hung  over  the  door  of  every  street  car.  Consciences  are 
worked  by  pulling  a  strap.  Liverymen  have  cyclometres  to 
help  customers  to  tell  the  truth,  and  the  Australian  ballot  is 
invented  to  help  men  to  be  manly  enough  to  vote  the  way 
they  think.  And  when,  in  the  course  of  human  events,  we 
came  to  the  essentially  moral  and  spiritual  reform  of  a  woman's 
right  to  dress  in  good  taste  —  that  is,  appropriately  for  what 
she  is  doing,  what  did  we  proceed  to  do  to  bring  it  about? 
Conventions  were  held  year  after  year,  and  over  and  over, 
to  get  women  to  dress  as  they  wanted  to;  dress  reform  associa- 
tions were  founded,  syndicates  of  courage  were  established 
all  over  the  land  —  all  in  vain;  and  finally,  —  Heaven  help  us! 
—  how  was  this  great  moral  and  spiritual  reform  accomplished? 
By  an  invention  of  two  wheels,  one  in  front  of  the  other.  It 
was  brought  about  by  the  Pope  Manufacturing  Company  of 
Hartford,  Connecticut  in  two  short  years. 

Everything  is  brought  about  by  manufacturing  companies. 


24  CROWDS 

It  is  the  socialist  spirit;  the  idea  that,  if  we  can  only  find  it, 
there  is  some  machine  that  can  surely  be  invented  that  will 
take  the  place  of  men  :  not  only  of  hands  and  feet,  but  of  all 
the  old-fashioned  and  lumbering  virtues,  courage,  patience, 
vision,  common  sense,  and  religion  itself,  out  of  which  they 
are  made. 

But  we  depend  upon  machinery  not  only  for  the  things 
that  we  want,  but  for  the  brains  with  which  we  decide  what 
we  want.  If  a  man  wants  to  know  what  he  thinks,  he  starts 
a  club;  and  if  he  wants  to  be  very  sure,  he  calls  a  convention. 
From  the  National  Undertakers'  Association  and  the  Laun- 
derers'  League  to  the  Christian  Endeavour  Tournament  and 
the  World's  Congress  —  the  Midway  Pleasance  of  Piety  — 
the  Convention  strides  the  world  with  vociferousness.  The 
silence  that  descends  from  the  hills  is  filled  with  its  ceaseless 
din.  The  smallest  hamlet  in  the  land  has  learned  to  listen 
reverent  from  afar  to  the  vast  insistent  roar  of  It,  as  the  Voice 
of  the  Spirit  of  the  Times. 

Every  idea  we  have  is  run  into  a  constitution.  We  cannot 
think  without  a  chairman.  Our  whims  have  secretaries;  our 
fads  have  by-laws.  Literature  is  a  club.  Philosophy  is  a 
society.  Our  reforms  are  mass  meetings.  Our  culture  is  a 
summer  school.  We  cannot  mourn  our  mighty  dead  without 
Carnegie  Hall  and  forty  vice-presidents.  We  remember  our 
poets  with  trustees,  and  the  immortality  of  a  genius  is  watched 
by  a  standing  committee.  Charity  is  an  Association.  The- 
ology is  a  set  of  resolutions.  Religion  is  an  endeavour  to  be 
numerous  and  communicative.  We  awe  the  impenitent  with 
crowds,  convert  the  world  with  boards,  and  save  the  lost 
with  delegates;  and  how  Jesus  of  Nazareth  could  have  done  so 
great  a  work  without  being  on  a  committee  is  beyond  our  ken. 
What  Socrates  and  Solomon  would  have  "come  to  if  they  had 
only  had  the  advantage  of  conventions  it  would  be  hard  to 
say;  but  in  these  days,  when  the  excursion  train  is  applied  to 
wisdom;  when,  having  little  enough,  we  try  to  make  it  more  by 


THE  CROWD  SCARE  25 

pulling  it  about;  when  secretaries  urge  us,  treasurers  dun  us, 
programs  unfold  out  of  every  mail  —  where  is  the  man  who, 
guileless-eyed,  can  look  in  his  brother's  face;  can  declare 
upon  his  honour  that  he  has  never  been  a  delegate,  never 
belonged  to  anything,  never  been  nominated,  elected,  imposed 
on,  in  his  life? 

Everything  convenes,  resolves,  petitions,  adjourns.  Nothing 
stays  adjourned.  We  have  reports  that  think  for  us,  com- 
mittees that  do  right  for  us,  and  platforms  that  spread  their 
wooden  lengths  over  all  the  things  we  love,  until  there  is 
hardly  an  inch  of  the  dear  old  earth  to  stand  on,  where,  fresh 
and  sweet  and  from  day  to  day,  we  can  hve  our  hves  ourselves, 
pick  the  jBowers,  look  at  the  stars,  guess  at  God,  garner  our 
grain,  and  die.  Every  new  and  fresh  human  being  that  comes 
upon  the  earth  is  manufactured  into  a  coward  or  crowded  into 
a  machine  as  soon  as  we  get  at  him.  We  have  already  come  to 
the  point  where  we  do  not  expect  to  interest  anybody  in  any- 
thing without  a  constitution.  And  the  Eugenic  Society  is  busy 
now  on  by-laws  for  falling  in  love. 

What  this  means  with  regard  to  the  typical  modern  man 
is,  not  that  he  does  not  think,  but  that  it  takes  ten  thousand 
men  to  make  him  think.  He  has  a  crowd  soul,  a  crowd  creed. 
Charged  with  convictions,  galvanized  from  one  convention  to 
another,  he  contrives  to  live,  and  with  a  sense  of  multitude, 
applause,  and  cheers  he  warms  his  thoughts.  When  they  have 
been  warmed  enough  he  exhorts,  dictates,  goes  hither  and 
thither  on  the  crutch  of  the  crowd,  and  places  his  crutch  on  the 
world,  and  pries  on  it,  if  perchance  it  may  be  stirred  to  some- 
thing. To  the  bigotry  of  the  man  who  knows  because  he  speaks 
for  himself  has  been  added  a  new  bigotry  on  the  earth  —  the 
bigotry  of  the  man  who  speaks  for  the  nation;  who,  with  a 
more  colossal  prejudice  than  he  had  before,  returns  from  a 
mass  meeting  of  himself,  and,  with  the  effrontery  that  only  a 
crowd  can  give,  backs  his  opinions  with  forty  states,  and  walks 
the  streets  of  his  native  town  in  the  uniform  of  all  humanity. 


26  CROWDS 

This  is  a  kind  of  fool  that  has  never  been  possible  until  these 
latter  days.  Only  a  very  great  many  people,  all  of  them 
working  on  him  at  once,  and  all  of  them  watching  every  one 
else  working  at  once,  can  produce  this  kind. 

Indeed,  the  crowd  habit  has  become  so  strong  upon  us,  has 
so  mastered  the  mood  of  the  hour,  that  even  you  and  I,  gentle 
reader,  have  found  ourselves  for  one  brief  moment,  perhaps, 
in  a  certain  sheepish  feeling  at  being  caught  in  a  small  audience. 
Being  caught  in  a  small  audience  at  a  lecture  is  no  insignificant 
experience.  You  will  see  people  looking  furtively  about,  count- 
ing one  another.  You  will  make  comparisons.  You  will  recall 
the  self-congratulatory  air  of  the  last  large  audience  you  had 
the  honour  to  belong  to,  sitting  in  the  same  seats,  buzzing 
confidently  to  itself  before  the  lecture  began.  The  hush  of 
disappointment  in  a  small  audience  all  alone  with  itself,  the 
mutual  shame  of  it,  the  chill  in  it,  that  spreads  softly  through 
the  room,  every  identical  shiver  of  which  the  lecturer  is  hired 
to  warm  through  —  all  these  are  signs  of  the  times.  People 
look  at  the  empty  chairs  as  if  every  modest,  unassuming  chair 
there  were  some  great  personality  saying  to  each  and  all  of  us : 
"Why  are  you  here.''  Did  you  not  make  a  mistake?  Are  you 
not  ashamed  to  be  a  party  to  —  to  —  as  small  a  crowd  as  this?  " 
Thus  do  we  sit,  poor  mortals,  doing  obeisance  to  Empty  Chairs 
—  we  who  are  to  be  lectured  to  —  until  the  poor  lecturer  who 
is  to  lecture  to  us  comes  in,  and  the  struggle  with  the  Chairs 
begins. 

When  we  turn  to  education  as  it  stands  to-day,  the  same 
self-satisfied,  inflexible  smile  of  the  crowd  is  upon  it  all.  We 
see  little  but  the  massing  of  machinery,  the  crowding  together 
of  numbers  of  teachers  and  numbers  of  courses  and  numbers 
of  students,  and  the  practical  total  submergence  of  personality, 
except  by  accident,  in  all  educated  life. 

The  infinite  value  of  the  individual,  the  innumerable  con- 
sequences of  one  single  great  teaching  man,  penetrating  every 
pupil  who  knows  him,  becoming  a  part  of  the  universe,  a  part 


THE  CROWD  SCARE  27 

of  the  fibre  of  thought  and  existence  to  every  pupil  who  knows 
him  —  this  is  a  thing  that  belongs  to  the  past  and  to  the 
inevitable  future.  With  all  our  great  institutions,  the  crowds 
of  men  who  teach  in  them,  the  crowds  of  men  who  learn  in 
them,  we  are  still  unable  to  produce  out  of  all  the  men  they 
graduate  enough  college  presidents  to  go  around.  The  fact 
that  at  almost  any  given  time  there  may  be  seen,  in  this  Ameri- 
can land  of  ours,  half  a  score  of  colleges  standing  and  waiting, 
wondering  if  they  will  ever  find  a  president  again,  is  the  climax 
of  what  the  universities  have  failed  to  do.  The  university 
will  be  justified  only  when  a  man  with  a  university  in  him,  a 
whole  campus  in  his  soul,  comes  out  of  it,  to  preside  over  it, 
and  the  soul  that  has  room  for  more  than  one  chair  in  it  comes 
out  of  it  to  teach  in  it. 

When  we  turn  from  education  to  journalism,  the  pressure 
of  the  crowd  is  still  more  in  evidence.  To  have  the  largest 
circulation  is  to  have  the  most  advertising,  and  to  have  the 
most  advertising  means  to  have  the  most  money,  and  to  have 
the  most  money  means  to  be  able  to  buy  the  most  ability, 
and  to  have  the  most  ability  means  to  keep  all  that  one  gains 
and  get  more.  The  degradation  of  many  of  our  great  journals 
in  the  last  twenty  years  is  but  the  inevitable  carrying  out  of 
the  syndicate  method  in  letters  —  a  mass  of  contributors, 
a  mass  of  subscribers,  and  a  mass  of  advertisers.  So  long  as  it 
gives  itself  over  to  the  circulation  idea,  the  worse  a  newspaper 
is,  the  more  logical  it  is.  There  may  be  a  certain  point  where 
it  is  bound  to  stop  some  time,  because  there  will  not  be  enough 
bad  people  who  are  bad  enough  to  go  around;  but  we  have  not 
come  to  it  yet,  and  in  the  meantime  about  everything  that  can 
be  thought  of  is  being  printed  to  make  bad  people.  If  it  be 
asserted  that  there  are  not  enough  bad  people  to  go  around 
even  now,  it  may  be  added  that  there  are  plenty  of  good  people 
to  take  their  places  as  fast  as  they  fail  to  be  bad  enough,  and 
.that  the  good  people  who  take  the  bad  papers  to  find  fault 
with  them  are  the  ones  who  make  such  papers  possible. 


28  CROWDS 

The  result  of  the  crowd  principle  is  the  inevitable  result. 
Our  journals  have  fallen  off  as  a  matter  of  course,  not  only  in 
moral  ideals  (which  everybody  realizes),  but  in  brain  force, 
power  of  expression,  imagination,  and  foresight  —  the  things 
that  give  distinction  and  results  to  utterance  and  that  make  a 
journal  worth  while.  The  editorial  page  has  been  practically 
abandoned  by  most  journals,  because  most  journals  have  been 
abandoned  by  their  editors:  they  have  become. printed  count- 
ing-rooms. With  all  their  greatness,  their  crowds  of  writers, 
and  masses  of  readers,  and  piles  of  cablegrams,  they  are  not 
able  to  produce  the  kind  of  man  who  is  able  to  say  a  thing 
the  kind  of  way  that  will  make  everybody  stop  and  listen  to 
him,  cablegrams  and  all.  Horace  Greeley  and  Samuel  Bowles 
and  Charles  A.  Dana  have  passed  from  the  press,  and  the 
march  of  the  crowd  through  the  miles  of  their  columns  every 
day  is  trampling  on  their  graves.  The  newspaper  is  the  mass 
machine,  the  crowd  thinker.  To  and  fro,  from  week  to  week 
and  from  year  to  year,  its  flaming  headlines  sway,  now  hither 
and  now  thither,  where  the  greatest  numbers  go,  or  the  best 
guess  of  where  they  are  going  to  go;  and  Personality,  creative, 
triumphant,  masterful,  imperious  Personality  —  is  it  not  at  an 
end.''  It  were  a  dazzling  sight,  perhaps,  to  gaze  at  night  upon  a 
huge  building,  thinking  with  telegraph  under  the  wide  sky 
around  the  world,  the  hurrying  of  its  hundred  pens  upon 
the  desks,  and  the  trembling  of  its  floors  with  the  mighty 
coming  of  a  Day  out  of  the  grip  of  the  press;  but  even  this 
huge  bewildering  pile  of  power,  this  aggregation,  this  corpora- 
tion of  forces,  machines  of  souls,  glittering  down  the  Night  — 
does  any  one  suppose  It  stands  by  Itself,  that  It  is  its  own 
master,  that  It  can  do  its  own  will  in  the  world.'*  In  all  its 
splendour  It  stands,  weaving  the  thoughts  of  the  world  in  the 
dark;  but  that  very  night,  that  very  moment.  It  lies  in  the 
power  of  a  little  ticking- thing  behind  its  doors.  It  belongs 
to  that  legislature  of  information  and  telegraph,  that  owner  of 
what  happens  in  a  day,  called  the  Associated  Press. 


THE  CROWD  SCARE  29 

If  the  One  who  called  Himself  a  man  and  a  God  had  not 
been  born  in  a  crowd,  if  He  had  not  loved  and  grappled  with 
it,  and  been  crucified  and  worshipped  by  it,  He  might  have 
been  a  Redeemer  for  the  silent,  stately,  ancient  world  that  was 
before  He  came,  but  He  would  have  failed  to  be  a  Redeemer 
for  this  modern  world  —  a  world  where  the  main  inspiration 
and  the  main  discouragement  is  the  crowd,  where  every  great 
problem  and  every  great  hope  is  one  that  deals  with  crowds. 
It  is  a  world  where,  from  the  first  day  a  man  looks  forth  to 
move,  he  finds  his  feet  and  hands  held  by  crowds.  The  sun 
rises  over  crowds  for  him,  and  sets  over  crowds;  and  having 
presumed  to  be  bom,  when  he  presumes  to  die  at  last,  in  a 
crowd  of  graves  he  is  left  not  even  alone  with  God.  Ten 
human  lives  deep  they  have  them  —  the  graves  in  Paris;  and 
whether  men  live  their  lives  piled  upon  other  men's  lives,  in 
blocks  in  cities  or  in  the  apparent  loneliness  of  town  or  country 
what  they  shall  do  or  shall  not  do,  or  shall  have  or  shall  not 
have  —  is  it  not  determined  by  crowds,  by  the  movement  of 
crowds?  The  farmer  is  lonely  enough,  one  would  say,  as  he 
rests  by  his  fire  in  the  plains,  his  barns  bursting  with  wheat; 
but  the  murmur  of  the  telegraph  almost  any  moment  is  the 
voice  of  the  crowd  to  him,  thousands  of  miles  away,  shouting 
in  the  Stock  Exchange:  "You  shall  not  sell  your  wheat!  Let 
it  lie!     Let  it  rot  in  your  barns!" 

And  yet,  if  a  man  were  to  go  around  the  earth  with  a  sur- 
veyor's chain,  there  would  seem  to  be  plenty  of  room  for  all 
who  are  born  upon  it.  The  fact  that  there  are  enough  square 
miles  of  the  planet  for  every  human  being  on  it  to  have  several 
square  miles  to  himself  does  not  prove  that  a  man  can  avoid 
the  crowd  —  that  it  is  not  a  crowded  world.  If  what  a  man 
could  be  were  determined  by  the  square  mile,  it  would  indeed 
be  a  gentle  and  graceful  earth  to  live  on.  But  an  acre  of 
Nowhere  satisfies  no  one;  and  how  many  square  miles  does  a 
man  want  to  be  a  nobody  in?  He  can  do  it  better  in  a  crowd, 
where  every  one  else  is  doing  it. 


80  CROWDS 

In  the  ancient  world,  when  a  human  being  found  something 
in  the  wrong  place  and  wanted  to  put  it  where  it  belonged,  he 
found  himself  face  to  face  with  a  few  men.  He  found  he  had 
to  deal  with  these  few  men.  To-day,  if  he  wants  anything  put 
where  it  belongs,  he  finds  himself  face  to  face  with  a  crowd. 
He  finds  that  he  has  to  deal  with  a  crowd.  The  world  has 
telephones  and  newspapers  now,  and  it  has  railroads;  and  if  a 
man  proposes  to  do  a  certain  thing  in  it,  the  telephones  tell 
the  few,  and  the  newspapers  tell  the  crowd,  and  the  crowd 
gets  on  to  the  railroad;  and  before  he  rises  from  his  sleep, 
behold  the  crowd  in  his  front  yard;  and  if  he  can  get  as  far  as 
his  own  front  gate  in  the  thing  he  is  going  for,  he  must  be  — 
either  a  statesman .^^  a  hero.?  or  a  great  genius.?  None  of 
these.  Let  him  be  a  corporation  —  of  ideas  or  of  dollars;  let 
him  be  some  complex,  solid,  crowded  thing,  would  he  do  any- 
thing for  himself,  or  for  anybody  else,  or  for  everybody  else, 
in  a  world  too  crowded  to  tell  the  truth  without  breaking 
sopiething,  or  to  find  room  for  it,  when  it  is  told,  without 
breaking  something. 

This  is  the  Crowd's  World. 


What  I  have  written  I  have  written. 

I  have  been  sitting  and  reading  it.  It  is  a  mood.  But 
there  is  an  implacable  truth  in  it,  I  believe,  that  must  be 
gotten  out  and  used. 

As  I  have  been  reading  I  have  looked  up.  I  see  the  quiet 
little  mountain  through  my  window  standing  out  there  in 
the  sun.  It  looks  around  the  world  as  if  nothing  had  happened; ' 
and  the  bobolinks  out  in  the  great  meadow  are  all  flying  and 
singing  in  the  same  breath  and  rowing  through  the  air,  thou- 
sands of  them,  miles  of  them.     They  do  not  stop  a  minute. 

A  moment  ago  while  I  was  writing  I  heard  the  Child  outside 
on  the  piazza,  four  years  old,  going  by  my  window  back  and 
forth,  listening  to  the  crunch  of  her  new  shoes  as  if  it  were  the 


THE  CROWD  SCARE  31 

music  of  the  spheres.  Why  should  not  I  do  as  well?  I  thought. 
The  Child  is  merely  seeing  her  shoes  as  they  are  with  as  many 
senses  and  as  many  thoughts  and  desires  at  once  as  she  can 
muster,  and  with  all  her  might. 

What  if  I  were  to  see  the  world  like  the  Child  .'^ 

Yesterday  I  went  to  Robert's  Meadow.  I  saw  three  small 
city  boys,  with  their  splendid  shining  rubber  boots  and  their 
beautiful  bamboo  poles.  They  were  on  their  way  home.  They 
had  only  the  one  trout  between  them,  and  that  had  been 
fondled,  examined,  and  poked  over  and  bragged  about  until 
it  was  fairly  stiff  and  brown  with  those  boys  —  looked  as  if  it 
had  been  stolen  out  of  a  dried-herring  box.  They  put  it  rev- 
erently back,  when  I  saw  it,  into  their  big  basket.  I  smiled 
a  little  as  I  walked  on  and  thought  how  they  felt  about  it. 

Then  suddenly  it  was  as  if  I  had  forgotten  something.  I 
turned  and  looked  back;  saw  those  three  boys  —  a  httle  retinue 
to  that  solitary  fish  —  trudging  down  the  road  in  the  yellow 
sun.  And  I  stood  there  and  wanted  to  be  in  it!  Then  I  saw 
them  going  round  the  bend  in  the  road  thirty  years  away. 

I  still  want  to  be  one  of  those  boys. 

And  I  am  going  to  try.  Perhaps,  Heaven  helping  me,  I 
will  yet  grow  up  to  them ! 

I  know  that  the  way  those  three  boys  felt  about  the  fish  — 
the  way  they  folded  it  around  with  something,  the  way  they 
made  the  most  of  it,  is  the  way  to  feel  about  the  world. 

I  side  with  the  three  boys.  I  am  ready  to  admit  that  as 
regards  technical  and  comparatively  unimportant  details  or  as 
regards  perspective  on  the  fish  the  boys  may  not  have  been 
right.  It  is  possible  that  they  had  not  taken  a  point  of  view, 
measured  in  inches  or  volts  or  foot-pounds,  that  was  right 
and  could  last  forever;  but  I  know  that  the  spirit  of  their 
point  of  view  was  right  —  the  spirit  that  hovered  around  the 
three  boys  and  around  the  fish  that  day  was  right  and  could 
last  forever. 

It  is  the  spirit  in  which  the  world  was  made,  and  the  spirit 


32  CROWDS 

in  which  new  worlds  in  all  ages,  and  even  before  our  eyes  by 
Boys  and  Girls  and  —  God,  are  being  made. 

It  is  only  the  boys  and  the  girls  (all  sizes)  who  know  about 
worlds.     And  it  is  only  boys  and  girls  who  are  right. 

I  heard  a  robin  in  the  apple  tree  this  morning  out  in  the 
rain  singing,  "/  believe!  I  believe!" 


At  the  same  time,  I  am  glad  that  I  have  known  and  faced, 
and  that  I  shall  have  to  know  and  face,  the  Crowd  Fear. 

I  know  in  some  dogged,  submerged,  and  speechless  way 
that  it  is  not  a  true  fear.  And  yet  I  want  to  move  along  the 
sheer  edge  of  it  all  my  life.  I  want  it.  I  want  all  men  to  have 
it,  and  to  keep  having  it,  and  to  keep  conquering  it.  I  have 
seen  that  no  man  who  has  not  felt  it,  who  does  not  know  this 
huge  numbing,  numberless  fear  before  the  crowd,  and  who  may 
not  know  it  again  almost  any  moment,  will  ever  be  able  to 
lead  the  crowd,  glory  in  it,  die  for  it,  or  help  it.  Nor  will  any 
man  who  has  not  defied  it,  and  lifted  his  soul  up  naked  and 
alone  before  it  and  cried  to  God,  ever  interpret  the  crowd  or 
express  the  will  of  the  crowd,  or  hew  out  of  earth  and  heaven 
what  the  crowd  wants. 

We  want  to  help  to  express  and  fulfil  a  crowd  civilization, 
we  want  to  share  the  crowd  life,  to  express  what  people  in 
crowds  feel  —  the  great  crowd  sensations,  excitements,  the 
inspirations  and  depressions  of  those  who  live  and  struggle 
with  crowds. 

We  want  to  face,  and  face  grimly,  implacably,  the  main 
facts,  the  main  emotions  men  are  having  to-day.  And  the 
main  emotion  men  are  having  to-day  about  our  modern  world 
is  that  it  is  a  crowded  world,  that  in  the  nature  of  the  case 
its  civilization  is  a  crowd  civilization.  Every  other  important 
thing  for  this  present  age  to  know  must  be  worked  out  from 
this  one.  It  is  the  main  thing  with  which  our  religion  has  to 
deal,  the  thing  our  literature  is  about,  and  the  thing  our  arts 


THE  CROWD  SCARE  S3 

will  be  obliged  to  express.  Any  man  who  makes  the  attempt 
to  consider  or  interpret  anything  either  in  art  or  life  without 
a  true  understanding  of  the  crowd  principle  as  it  is  working 
to-day,  without  a  due  sense  of  its  central  place  in  all  that 
goes  on  around  us,  is  a  spectator  in  the  blur  and  bewilderment 
of  this  modern  world,  as  helpless  in  it,  and  as  childish  and 
superficial  in  it,  as  a  Greek  god  at  tlte  World's  Fair,  gazing 
out  of  his  still  Olympian  eyes  at  the  Midway  Pleasance. 


After  the  Crowd  Fear  there  comes  to  most  of  us  the  machine 
fear.  Machines  are  the  huge  limbs  or  tentacles  of  crowds. 
As  the  crowds  grow  the  machines  grow;  grasping  at  the  little 
strip  of  sky  over  us,  at  the  little  patch  of  ground  beneath  our 
feet,  they  swing  out  before  us  and  beckon  daily  to  us  new  hells 
and  new  heavens  in  our  eyes. 


CHAPTER  III 
THE,  MACHINE  SCARE 

1  HAVE  had  occasion  nearly  every  day  for  the  past  two  weeks 
to  pass  by  an  ancient  churchyard  on  a  great  hillside  not  far 
from  London.  Most  of  the  stones  are  very  old,  and  seem  to 
have  been  thoughtfully  and  reverently,  flake  by  flake,  wrought 
into  their  final  form  by  long- vanished  hands.  As  I  stand  and 
watch  them,  with  the  yews  and  cypresses  flocking  round  them, 
it  is  as  if  in  some  sort  of  way  they  had  been  surely  wrought  by 
the  hand  of  love,  so  full  are  they  of  grief  and  of  joy,  of  devotion, 
of  the  very  singing  of  the  dead  and  of  those  who  loved  them. 

When  I  walk  on  a  little  farther,  and  come  to  a  small  and 
new  addition  to  the  churchyard,  and  look  about  me  at  the 
stones,  I  find  myself  suddenly  in  quite  a  new  company.  So 
far  as  one  could  observe,  looking  at  the  gravestones  in  the 
new  churchyard,  the  people  who  died  there  died  rather  thought- 
lessly and  mechanically,  and  as  if  nobody  cared  very  much. 
Of  course,  when  one  thinks  a  little  further,  one  knows  that  this 
cannot  be  true,  and  that  the  men  and  the  women  who  gathered 
by  these  glib,  trim,  capable-looking  modern  tombstones  were  as 
full  of  love  and  tenderness  and  reverence  before  their  dead  as 
the  others  were  —  but  the  lines  on  the  stones  give  no  sign. 
One  never  stops  to  read  an  epitaph  on  one  of  them;  one  knows 
it  would  not  be  interesting,  or  really  whisper  to  one  the 
strange,  happy,  human  things  of  another  world  —  even  of 
this  world,  that  make  the  old  tombstones  such  good  company 
and  so  friendly  to  us.  One  gives  a  glance  at  the  stone  and 
passes  on.  It  was  made  by  machinery,  apparently;  a  machine 
might  have  designed  it,  a  machine  might  have  died  and  been 

S4 


THE  MACHINE  SCARE  35 

buried  under  it.  One  looks  beyond  it  at  all  the  others  like  it  — 
all  the  glib,  competent-looking  white  stones.  Were  the  silenced 
people  all  machines  under  them,  all  mechanical,  all  made  to 
a  pattern  like  their  stones,  like  these  strangely  hard,  brief 
tombstones  standing  here  at  their  heads,  summing  up  their 
lives  before  us  curtly,  heartlessly,  on  this  gentle  old  hillside .'' 

I  wondered. 

I  looked  back  to  the  old  eloquent  cemetery  that  almost 
seemed  to  be  breathing  things,  and  looked  once  more  at  the 
new. 

And  as  I  stood  and  thought,  they  seemed  to  me  to  be  two 
worlds  —  one  the  world  the  people  all  about  me  are  always 
saying  sadly  is  going  by,  and  the  other  —  well,  the  one  we 
will  have  to  have. 


As  I  look  off  from  the  hilltop  at  the  great  sloping  country- 
side about  me,  which  stretches  miles  and  miles,  with  its  green 
fields,  and  bushy  treetops,  its  red  roofs,  its  banners  of  steam 
from  twenty  railways,  its  huge,  grim,  furious  chimneys,  its 
still,  sleepy  steeples,  I  also  see  two  worlds,  the  same  two  worlds 
over  again  that  I  saw  in  the  churchyard,  except  that  they  are 
all  jumbled  together  —  the  complacent,  capable,  cut-out,  home- 
less-looking houses,  the  little  snuggled-down  old  ones  with  their 
happy  trees  about  them  and  trails  of  cooking  smoke.  I  see  the 
same  two  worlds  standing  and  facing  each  other  before  me 
whichever  way  I  turn. 

And  when  I  slip  out  of  the  churchyard  from  those  two  little 
separate  worlds  of  the  dead,  and  move  slowly  down  the  long 
bustling  village  street,  and  look  into  the  faces  of  the  living, 
the  same  two  worlds  that  were  in  the  churchyard  and  on  the 
hills  seem  to  look  at  me  out  of  the  faces  of  the  living  too. 

The  faces  go  hurrying  past  me,  worlds  apart.  Most  people, 
I  imagine,  who  read  these  pages  must  have  noticed  the  people's 
faces  in  the  streets  nowadays  —  how  they  seem  to  have  come 


36  CROWDS 

out  of  separate  worlds  into  the  street  a  moment,  and  hurry 
past,  and  seem  to  be  going  back  in  a  moment  more  to  separate 
worlds. 

There  is  hardly  even  a  village  footway  left  anywhere  to-day 
where  one  cannot  see  these  two  worlds,  or  the  spirit  of  these 
two  worlds,  flitting  past  one  through  the  streets  in  people's 
faces,  and  nightly  before  our  eyes,  struggling  with  each  other 
to  possess,  to  swallow  away  into  itself  human  souls,  to  master 
the  fate  of  man  upon  the  earth. 

One  of  these  is  the  World  of  the  Hand-made;  the  other  is 
the  Machine-made  World. 


As  day  by  day  I  watch  these  two  worlds  with  all  their  people 
in  them  flocking  past  me,  I  have  come  to  have  certain  momen- 
tary but  recurrent  resentments  and  attractions,  unaccountable 
strong  emotions;  and  when  I  try  afterward  to  rationalize  my 
emotions,  as  a  man  should,  and  give  an  account  of  them  to 
myself,  and  get  them  ready  to  use  and  face  my  age  with,  and 
make  myself  strong  and  fit  to  live  in  an  age,  I  find  myself 
with  a  great  task  before  me.  And  yet  one  must  do  it;  one 
cannot  live  in  an  age  strongly  and  fitly  if  one  would  rather 
be  living  in  some  other  age,  or  if  it  is  an  age  with  two  worlds  in 
it  and  one  cannot  make  up  one's  mind  which  is  the  world  one 
wants  and  settle  down  quietly  and  live  in  it.  Then  a  strange 
thing  happens,  and  always  happens  the  moment  I  begin  to 
try  to  decide  which  of  the  two  —  the  Hand-made  World  or  the 
Machine-made  World  —  I  will  choose.  I  find  that  in  an  odd, 
confused,  groping,  obstinate  way  I  am  bound  to  choose  them 
both.  In  spite  of  all  its  ugly  ways  —  a  kind  of  vast  indifference 
it  has  to  me,  to  everybody,  its  magnificent  heartlessness  —  I 
find  I  have  come  to  take  in  the  Machine-made  World  a  kind 
of  boundless,  half -secret  pride  and  joy,  for  a  terrible  and  strange 
beauty  there  is  in  it.  And  then,  too,  even  if  I  wanted  to  give 
it  up,  I  could  not:  neither  I  nor  any  man,  nor  all  the  world 


THE  MACHINE  SCARE  37 

combined,  could  unthink  to-day  a  hundred  years,  fold  up  a 
hundred  thousand  miles  of  railway,  tuck  modern  life  all  neatly 
up  again  in  a  little,  old,  snug,  safe,  lovable  Hand-made  World. 
There  must  be  some  way  out,  some  connecting  link  between 
the  Hand-made  and  the  Machine-made.  We  have  merely 
lost  it  for  a  moment. 

Which  way  shall  we  turn?  And  so  at  last  to  the  little  Thing 
through  which  the  whole  world  whispers  to  me  on  my  desk, 
to  the  mighty  railways  that  beckon  past  my  door,  to  the  air- 
ships that  cannot  be  stilled,  and  to  the  rolling  mills  that  will 
not  be  silenced,  I  turn  at  last!  I  turn  to  the  Machines  Them- 
selves. Half-singing  and  half-cursing,  I  have  faced  them. 
There  is  some  way  in  which  they  can  answer  and  can  be  made 
to  answer  —  can  be  made  to  give  me  and  the  men  about  me 
the  kind  of  world  we  want.  I  try  to  analyze  it  and  think  it 
out.  AVhat  is  the  thing,  the  real  thing  in  the  Hand-made 
World,  that  fills  me  with  pride  and  joy,  and  that  I  cannot  and 
will  not  give  up.''  Is  not  the  real  thing  that  is  in  it  something 
that  can  be  or  might  be  freed  from  it,  exhaled  from  it,  some- 
thing that  might  be  in  some  new  form  saved,  made  an  atmos- 
phere or  a  spirit  and  passed  on?  And  what  is  it  in  the  new 
Machine-made  World  which,  in  spite  of  the  splendid  joy,  a 
rough  new,  wild  religion  there  is  in  it,  keeps  daily  filling  me 
as  I  go  past  machines  with  this  contradictory  obstinate  dread 
of  them?  After  a  time  I  have  made  a  little  cleared  space  in 
my  mind,  a  little  breathing  room.  It  has  come  to  me  from 
thinking  that  what  is  beautiful  in  the  Hand-made  World 
perhaps  is  not  these  particular  Hand-made  things  themselves 
in  which  I  so  delight,  but  the  Hand-made  spirit  of  the  men 
who  made  them  which  the  men  put  into  the  things.  And 
perhaps  what  is  full  of  death  and  fear  in  the  Machine-made 
World  is  not  the  machines  themselves,  but  the  Machine-made 
spirit  in  which  the  men  who  run  the  machines  have  made  the 
machines  work.  Perhaps  the  Hand-made  spirit  is  pervasive, 
eternal.     Perhaps  it  can  escape  like  a  spirit,  and  can  live  where 


38  CROWDS 

it  will  live,  and  do  what  it  will  do,  like  a  spirit,  and  possess  the 
body  that  it  wills  to  possess.  Perhaps  the  Hand-made  spirit 
is  still  living  around  me  to-day,  and  is  not  only  living,  but  is 
living  in  a  more  unspeakable,  unbounded  body  than  any  spirit 
has  ever  lived  in  before,  and  is  to-day  before  our  eyes,  laying 
its  huge  iron  fingers  around  our  little  earth,  and  holding  the 
oceans  in  its  hand,  and  brushing  away  mountains  with  a 
breath,  until  we  have  Man  at  last  playing  all  night  through 
the  sky,  with  visions  and  airships  and  telescopes.  His  very 
words  walk  on  the  air  with  soft  and  unseen  feet. 

It  is  the  Hand-made  spirit  that  creates  machines.  The 
machines  themselves  are  still  the  mighty  children  of  the  men 
who  move  and  work  in  the  Hand-made  spirit;  and  the  men  who 
glory  in  them,  the  men  who  bring  them  forth,  who  think  them 
out,  and  who  create  them,  and  who  do  the  great  and  mighty 
things  with  them,  are  still  the  Hand-made  men. 


This  leads  us  up  to  the  question  we  are  all  asking  ourselves 
every  day.  "How  can  a  machine-made  world  be  run  in  the 
spirit  of  a  hand-made  world?"  The  particular  form  in  which 
the  question  has  been  put,  which  is  taken  from  "Inspired 
Millionaires"  is  as  follows  : 

"The  idea  that  there  is  something  in  a  machine  simply  as  a 
machine  which  makes  it  inherently  unspiritual  is  based  upon 
the  experience  of  the  world;  but  it  is,  after  all,  a  rather  amateur 
and  juvenile  world  with  machines  as  yet.  Its  ideas  are  in 
their  first  stages,  and  are  based  for  the  most  part  upon  the 
world's  experience  with  second-rate  men,  working  in  second- 
rate  factories  —  men  who  have  been  bullied,  and  could  be 
bullied,  by  the  machines  they  worked  with  into  being  machines 
themselves.  No  one  would  think  of  denying  that  men  who 
let  machines  get  the  better  of  them,  either  in  their  minds  or 
their  bodies,  in  any  walk  of  life,  grow  unspiritual  and  mechani- 
cal.    But  it  does  not  take  a  machine  to  make  a  machine  out  of 


THE  MACHINE  SCARE  39 

a  man.  Anything  will  do  it  if  the  man  will  let  it.  Even  the 
farmer  who  is  out  under  the  great  free  dome  of  heaven,  and 
working  in  wonder  every  day  of  his  life,  grows  like  a  clod  if  he 
buries  his  soul  alive  in  the  soil.  But  farming  has  been  tried 
many  thousands  of  years,  and  the  other  kind  of  farmer  is 
known  by  everj^body  —  the  farmer  who  is  master  over  the 
soil;  who,  instead  of  becoming  an  expression  of  the  soil  himself, 
makes  the  soil  express  him.  The  next  thing  that  is  going  to 
happen  is  that  every  one  is  going  to  know  the  other  kind  of 
mechanic.  It  is  cheerfully  admitted  that  the  kind  of  mechanic 
we  largely  have  now,  who  allows  himself  to  be  a  watcher  of  a 
machine,  a  turner-of-something  for  forty  years,  can  hardly  be 
classed  as  vegetable  life.  He  is  not  even  organic  matter  except 
in  a  very  small  part  of  himself. 

"But  it  is  not  the  mechanical  machine  which  makes  the 
man  unspiritual.  It  is  the  mechanical  man  beside  the  machine. 
A  master  at  a  piano  (which  is  a  machine)  makes  it  a  spiritual 
thing;  and  a  master  at  a  printing-press,  like  William  Morris, 
makes  it  a  free  and  artistic  and  self-expressive  thing." 

I  spent  a  day  a  little  while  ago  in  walking  through  a  factory. 
I  went  past  miles  of  machines  —  great  glass  roofs  of  sun- 
shine over  them  —  and  looked  in  the  faces  of  thousands  of 
men.  As  I  went  through  the  machines  I  kept  looking  to  and 
fro  between  the  machines  and  the  men  who  stood  beside  them, 
and  sometimes  I  came  back  and  looked  again  at  the  machines 
and  the  men  beside  them;  and  every  machine,  or  nearly  every 
machine,  I  saw  (any  one  could  see  it  in  that  factory)  was  making 
a  man  of  somebody.  One  could  see  the  spirit  of  the  man  who 
invented  the  machine,  and  the  spirit  of  the  man  who  worked 
with  it,  and  the  spirit  of  the  man  who  owned  it  and  who  placed 
it  there  with  the  man,  all  softly,  powerfully  running  together. 
There  were  exceptions,  and  every  now  and  then  one  came,  of 
course,  upon  the  man  who  seemed  to  be  simply  another  and 
somewhat  difiFerent  contrivance  or  attachment  to  his  machine 
—  some  part  that  had  been  left  over  and  thought  of  last,  and 


40  CROWDS 

had  not  been  done  as  well  as  the  others;  but  the  factory,  taken 
as  a  whole,  from  the  manager's  oflBces  and  the  great  counting- 
room,  and  from  the  tall  chimneys  to  the  dump,  seemed  to  me 
to  have  something  fresh  and  human  and  unwonted  about  it. 
It  seemed  to  be  a  factory  that  had  a  look,  a  look  of  its  own. 
It  was  like  a  vast  countenance.  It  had  features,  an  expression. 
It  had  an  air  —  well,  one  must  say  it,  of  course,  if  one  is  driven 
to  it :  the  factory  had  a  soul,  and  was  humming  it.  Any  one 
could  have  seen  why  by  going  into  his  office  and  talking  a  little 
while  with  the  owner,  or  by  even  not  talking  to  him  —  by 
seeing  him  look  up  from  his  desk.  After  walking  through 
several  miles  of  his  personality,  and  up  and  down  and  down 
and  up  the  corridors  of  his  mind,  one  did  not  really  need  to 
meet  him  except  as  a  matter  of  form  and  as  a  finishing  touch. 
One  had  been  visiting  with  him  all  along  :  to  look  in  his  face 
was  merely  to  sum  it  up,  to  see  it  all,  the  whole  place,  over 
again  in  one  look.  One  did  not  need  to  be  surprised;  one 
might  have  kno^\Ti  what  such  a  man  would  be  like  —  that  such 
a  factory  could  only  be  conceived  and  wrought  by  a  man  of 
genius,  a  kind  of  lighted-up  man.  A  man  who  had  put  not 
only  skylights  in  his  buildings,  but  skylights  in  his  men,  would 
have  to  have  a  skylight  in  himself  (a  skylight  with  a  motor 
attachment,  of  course). 

If  one  were  to  try  to  think  in  nature  or  in  art  of  something 
that  would  be  like  him  —  well,  some  kind  of  transcendental 
engine,  I  should  say,  running  softly,  smoothly  outdoors  in  a 
great  sunshine,  would  have  given  one  a  good  idea  of  him. 
But,  however  this  may  be,  it  certainly  would  have  been  quite 
impossible  to  go  through  his  factory  and  ever  say  again  that 
machines  do  not  and  could  not  have  souls,  or  at  least  over- 
souls,  and  that  men  who  worked  with  machines  did  not  and 
could  not  have  souls  as  fast  as  they  were  allowed  to. 

A  few  days  later  I  went  through  another  factory,  and  I 
came  out  weary  and  spent  at  night,  feeling  as  unreasonable 
and  almost  as  hateful  about  machines,  and  as  discouraged 


THE  MACHINE  SCARE  41 

about  the  people  who  had  to  work  with  them  as  John  Ruskin 
did  in  those  first  early  days  when  the  Factory  Chimney  first 
lifted  its  long  black  flag  upon  our  earth,  and  bullied  great  cities 
into  cowards  and  slaves,  and  all  the  great,  quiet-hearted  nations, 
and  began  making  for  us  —  all  around  us,  before  our  eyes, 
as  though  in  a  kind  of  jeer  at  us,  and  at  our  queer,  pretty, 
helpless  little  religions  —  the  hell  we  had  ceased  to  be- 
lieve in. 

The  hell  is  here,  and  is  going  to  be  here  apparently  as  long 
as  may  be  necessary  for  us  to  see  it  and  believe  in  it  once  more. 
If  a  hell  on  our  own  premises,  shut  down  hard  over  our  lives  here 
and  now,  is  what  is  necessary  to  make  us  religious  and  human 
once  more,  if  we  are  reduced  to  it,  and  if  having  a  hard,  literal 
hell  —  one  of  our  own  —  is  our  only  way  of  seeing  things, 
of  fighting  our  way  through  to  the  truth,  and  of  getting  once 
more  decisive,  manful,  commanding  ideas  of  good  and  evil,  I 
for  one  can  only  be  glad  we  have  Pittsburgs  and  Sheffields  to 
hurry  us  along  and  soon  have  it  over  with. 

But  while,  like  Ruskin,  any  one  can  look  about  the  machines 
and  see  hell,  he  can  see  hell  to-day,  unlike  Ruskin,  with  heaven 
lined  up  close  beside  it.  The  machines  have  come  to  have 
souls.  The  machines  we  can  see  all  about  us  have  taken  sides. 
We  can  all  of  us  see  the  machines  about  us  to-day  like  vast 
looms,  weaving  in  and  weaving  out  the  fate  of  the  world,  the 
fate  of  the  churches,  the  fate  of  the  women  and  the  little 
children,  and  the  very  fate  of  God;  and  everything  about  us  we 
can  see  turning  at  last  on  what  we  are  doing  with  the  machines 
that  are  about  us,  and  what  we  are  letting  our  machines  do 
with  us. 


It  has  cleared  my  mind,  and  at  least  helped  me  to  live  side 
by  side  with  machines  better  from  day  to  day,  to  consider 
what  these  two  souls  or  spirits  in  the  machines  are,  and  what 
they  are  doing  and  likely  to  do.     If  one  knows  them  and  one 


42  CROWDS 

sees  them,  and  sees  how  they  are  working,  it  is  easier  to  take 
sides  and  join  in  and  help. 

It  would  seem  to  me  that  there  are  two  spirits  in  machinery 
—  the  spirit  of  weariness,  weakness,  of  inventing  ways  of  getting 
out  of  work;  and  there  is  the  spirit  in  the  machines,  too,  of 
moving  mountains,  conquering  the  sea  and  air,  of  working 
harder  and  lifting  one's  work  over  to  more  heroic,  to  more 
splendid  and  difficult,  and  almost  impossible  things.  It  is 
these  two  spirits  that  are  fighting  for  the  possession  and  control 
of  our  machine  civilization.  I  watch  the  machines  and  the 
men  beside  them  and  see  which  side  they  are  on.  The  labourer 
who  is  doing  as  little  work  as  he  dares  for  his  wages  and  the 
capitalist  who  is  giving  as  little  service  as  he  dares  for  his 
money  are  on  the  one  side  (the  vast,  lazy,  mean  majority  of 
employers  and  employees),  and  there  may  be  seen  standing 
on  the  other  side  against  them,  battling  for  our  world,  another 
small  but  mighty  group  made  up  of  the  labourer  who  loves 
his  work  more  than  his  wages,  and  the  capitalist  who  loves  the 
thing  he  makes  more  than  the  profit.  In  other  words,  the 
fate  of  our  modern  civilization,  with  all  its  marvellous  machines 
on  it,  its  art  galleries  and  its  churches,  is  all  hanging  to-day 
on  the  battle  between  the  spirit  of  achievement,  the  spirit 
of  creating  things,  and  the  spirit  of  weariness  or  the  spirit  of 
thinking  of  ways  of  getting  out  of  things. 

It  does  not  take  very  long  to  see  which  one  prefers  when 
one  considers  the  problem  of  living  in  one  world  or  the  other. 
If  we  are  to  take  our  choice  between  living  in  a  world  run  by 
tired  men  and  a  world  run  by  inspired  ones,  most  of  us  will 
have  little  difficulty  in  deciding  which  we  would  prefer,  and 
which  one  we  are  bound  to  have.  I  have  been  moved  to  come 
forward  with  the  idea  of  inspired  employers  —  or,  as  I  have 
called  it,  "Inspired  Millionaires"  —  because  it  would  seem  to 
me  inspired  employers  are  the  very  least  we  can  ask  for;  for 
certainly  if  even  our  employers  cannot  be  inspired  or  rested 
and  strong,  we  cannot  expect  their  overworked  workmen  to  be. 


THE  MACHINE  SCARE  43 

There  is  no  hope  for  us  but  to  write  our  books  and  to  live  our 
lives  in  such  a  way  as  to  help  put  the  world  in  the  hands  of  the 
Strong,  and  to  help  keep  its  institutions  and  customs  out  of 
the  hands  of  the  overworked.  Overworked  mechanical  em- 
ployers and  overworked  labourers  are  the  last  men  to  solve  the 
problem  of  the  overworked,  except  in  a  small,  tired,  mean 
resentful,  temporary  way. 

And  so,  as  I  look  about  me  and  watch  the  machines  and 
the  men  who  are  working  with  the  machines,  or  owning  them, 
it  is  on  this  principle  that  I  find  myself  taking  sides.  I  will 
not  hve,  if  I  can  help  it,  in  a  world  that  is  conceived  and  ar- 
ranged and  managed  by  tired  and  overworked  and  mechanical 
men.  Have  I  not  seen  tired,  mechanical  men,  whole  genera- 
tions of  them,  vast  mobs  of  them,  the  men  who  have  let  the 
machines  mow  down  their  souls?  The  first  thing  I  have  come 
to  ask  of  a  man,  if  he  is  to  be  at  the  head  of  a  machine  — 
whether  it  is  a  machine  called  a  factory,  or  a  machine  called 
a  Government  or  a  city,  or  a  machine  called  a  nation  —  is, 
Is  he  tired?  I  have  cast  my  lot  once  for  all  —  and  as  it  seems 
to  me,  too,  the  lot  of  the  world  —  with  those  men  who  are 
rested,  with  the  surplus  men,  the  men  who  want  to  work  more 
not  less,  who  are  still  and  gentle  and  strong  in  their  hearts, 
steady  in  their  imaginations,  great  men  —  men  who  are  not 
driven  to  being  self-centred  or  driven  to  being  class-centred, 
who  can  be  world-centred  and  inspired. 


When  one  has  made  this  decision,  that  one  will  work  for  a 
world  in  control  of  men  who  are  strong,  one  suddenly  is  brought 
face  to  face  with  a  fact  in  our  machine  civilization  which 
probably  is  quite  new,  and  which  the  spirit  of  man  has  never 
had  to  face  in  any  age  before. 

For  the  first  time  in  the  history  of  the  world,  machinery 
has  made  it  possible  for  the  world  to  get  into  the  hands  of  the 
weak. 


44  CROWDS 

The  Gun  began  it  —  the  gun  in  a  coward's  hands  may  side 
with  the  weak,  and  the  machine  in  the  hands  of  the  weak  may 
temporarily  give  the  world  a  list  or  a  trend,  and  leave  it  leaning 
on  the  wrong  side. 

The  Trust,  for  instance,  which  is  really  an  extremely  valuable 
invention,  and  perhaps,  on  the  whole,  the  most  important 
machine  of  modern  times  when  it  is  used  to  defend  the  rights 
of  the  people,  is  a  very  different  thing  when  it  is  pointed  at 
them.  We  have  to-day,  not  unnaturally,  the  spectacle  of 
perhaps  nine  people  out  of  ten  getting  up  and  saying  in  chorus 
all  through  the  world  that  Trusts  ought  to  be  abolished;  and 
yet  it  cannot  honestly  be  said  that  there  is  really  anything 
about  the  trust-machine  —  any  more  than  any  other  machine 
—  that  is  inherently  wicked,  or  mechanical  and  heartless. 
Our  real  objection  to  the  trust-machines  is  not  to  the  machines 
themselves,  but  to  the  fact  that  they  are,  or  happen  to  be 
(judging  each  Trust  by  itself),  in  the  hands  of  the  weak  and 
of  the  tired  —  of  men,  that  is,  who  have  no  spirit,  no  imagina- 
tion about  people;  mechanical-minded  men,  who,  at  least  in 
the  past,  have  taken  the  easiest  and  laziest  course  in  business  — 
that  of  making  all  the  money  they  can. 

The  moment  we  see  the  Trusts  in  the  hands  of  the  strong 
men,  the  men  who  are  unwilling  to  slump  back  into  mere 
money-making,  and  who  face  daily  with  hardihood  and  with 
joy  the  feat  of  weaving  into  business  several  strands  of  value 
at  once,  making  things  and  making  money  and  making  men 
together,  the  Trust  will  become  a  vast  machine  of  human 
happiness,  lifting  up  and  pulling  on  the  world  for  all  of  us  day 
and  night. 

If  our  labouring  men  to-day  are  to  be  got  out  from  under 
the  machines,  we  can  only  bring  it  to  pass  by  doing  everything 
we  can  in  directors'  meetings  or  in  labor  unions  or  as  buyers  or 
as  journalists  —  whatever  we  may  be  —  to  keep  the  trust- 
machines  in  this  world  out  of  the  hands  of  the  tired,  weak,  and 
mechanical-minded  men. 


THE  MACHINE  SCARE  45 

And  the  things  that  have  been  happening  to  the  trust- 
machines,  or  are  about  to  happen  to  them,  have  happened 
and  are  beginning  to  happen  before  our  eyes  to  the  machines 
themselves.  The  machines  of  flame  and  iron  wheels  and  men 
in  monstrous  factories  which  the  philosophers  and  the  poets 
and  the  very  preachers  have  doomed  our  world  with  are  passing 
through  the  same  evolution  as  the  trust-machines,  and  shall 
be  seen  at  last  through  the  dim  struggle  yielding  themselves, 
bending  their  iron  wills  to  the  same  indomitable  human  spirit, 
the  same  slow,  stern,  implacable  will  of  the  soul  of  man.  They 
shall  be  inspired  machines. 

Now  for  a  long  time  we  have  seen  (for  the  most  part)  the 
weak  and  mechanical-minded  employer,  the  man  who  takes 
the  line  of  least  resistance  in  business,  on  every  hand  about  us, 
making  his  employees  mechanical-minded.  The  men  have 
not  been  able  to  work  without  machines  to  work  with,  and  as 
they  have  been  obliged  to  come  to  him  to  get  the  machines,  he 
has  adopted  the  policy  of  letting  himself  fall  into  the  weakest 
and  easiest  way  of  keeping  his  men  under  his  own  control.  He 
takes  the  machines  the  men  have  come  to  him  to  get,  and  turns 
them  back  against  them,  points  them  at  their  lives,  stops 
their  minds  with  them,  their  intelligence  and  manhood,  the 
very  hope  and  religion  with  which  they  live;  and  of  course, 
when  men  have  had  machines  pointed  at  them  long  enough, 
one  sees  them  on  every  hand  being  mowed  down  in  rows  into 
machines  themselves  —  as  deadly  and  as  hopeless  to  make  a 
civilization  out  of,  or  a  nation  out  of,  or  to  give  votes  to,  or  to 
have  for  fathers  as  machines  would  be,  as  iron  or  leather  or 
wood. 

In  the  meantime,  however,  we  seem  to  have  been  developing 
—  partly  by  competition  and  partly  by  combination  and  by 
experience  —  employers  who  are  not  mechanical-minded,  who 
have  spirit  themselves,  and  who  believe  in  it  and  can  use  it  in 
others;  who  find  ways  of  adjusting  the  hours,  the  wages,  and 
the  conditions  of  work  for  the  men,  so  that  what  is  most  valuable 


46  CROWDS 

in  them,  their  spirit,  their  imaginations,  their  hourly  good-wili, 
can  all  be  turned  into  the  business,  can  all  daily  be  used  as  the 
most  important  part  of  the  working  equipment  of  the  factory. 
These  employers  have  found  (by  believing  it  long  enough  to 
try  it)  that  live  men  can  do  better  and  more  marketable  work 
than  dead  ones.  If  the  great  slow-moving  majority  of  our 
modern  machine  employers  were  not  mechanical-minded,  it 
would  not  be  necessary  to  prove  to  them  categorically  the  little 
platitude  (which  even  people  who  have  observed  cab-horses 
know)  that  the  living  is  more  valuable  than  the  half-dead,  and 
that  live  men  can  do  better  and  more  marketable  work  than 
half -dead  ones. 

But,  of  course,  if  they  are  not  convinced  by  imagination  or 
by  arguments  or  by  figures,  they  may  have  to  be  convinced 
by  losing  their  business;  for  the  most  spirited  employers,  those 
who  take  the  more  difficult  and  creative  course  of  making 
money  and  men  together,  are  sure  to  be  the  employers  who  will 
get  and  keep  the  most  spirited  men,  and  are  sure  to  crowd  out 
of  the  market  in  their  own  special  line  employers  who  can 
only  get  and  keep  mechanical-minded  ones. 


It  would  be  hard  to  overstate  the  importance  of  the  battle 
now  going  on  among  the  trades  unions  between  the  spirited 
labourers  and  the  tired  ones,  and  among  the  manufacturers 
between  the  inspired  employers  and  the  mechanical-minded 
ones. 

For  the  time  being,  at  least,  it  is  the  inspired  employers 
who  have  most  power  to  change  the  conditions  of  labour  and 
to  free  the  mechanical-minded  slaves.  It  is  they  who  are 
standing  to-day  on  the  great  strategical  ground  of  our  time. 
They  hold  the  pass  of  human  life.  People  cannot  expect  to  be 
inspired  in  crowds.  Crowds  are  too  unwieldy  and  too  incon- 
venient to  act  quickly.  The  people  can  only  concentrate  their 
energies   on   getting  and   demanding   inspired   employers,   on 


THE  MACHINE  SCARE  47 

insisting  that  the  men  who  for  eight  or  nine  hours  a  day  are 
pouring  in  with  their  wages  their  thoughts,  and  their  motives, 
the  very  hope  with  which  they  Hve,  into  their  hves,  shall  be 
the  champions  of  the  people,  shall  represent  them  and  act  for 
them,  as  they  are  not  placed  to  act  for  themselves,  and  with 
more  imagination  than  they  can  yet  expect  to  have  for  them- 
selves. If  our  labouring  men  of  to-day  are  going  to  struggle 
out  from  under  the  machines,  they  can  only  do  it  by  doing  all 
that  they  can  in  labour  unions  and  in  the  press  and  at  the 
polls  to  keep  the  machines  in  this  world  out  of  the  hands  of 
tired  and  mechanical-minded  owners. 

But  probably  the  more  immediate  rescue  from  the  evil  or 
mechanicalness  in  machines  is  not  going  to  come  from  the 
employers  on  the  one  hand  or  the  employees  on  the  other, 
but  from  having  the  employees  in  the  Trades  Unions  and  the 
employers  in  the  directors'  meetings  combining  together  to 
keep  in  subordinate  places  where  they  cannot  hurt  others  all 
rpen,  whether  directors  or  employees,  who  do  not  work  harder 
than  they  have  to,  and  who  have  not  the  brains  to  do  their 
work  for  something  besides  money.  The  men  who  are  like 
this  will  of  course  be  pitied  and  duly  considered,  but  they  will 
be  kept  where  they  will  not  have  power  to  control  other  men, 
or  where  by  force  of  position  or  by  mere  majority  they  will  be 
able  to  bully  other  men  to  work  as  mechanically  as  they  do. 
Workmen  who  do  not  want  to  become  machines  can  only 
better  conditions  by  combination  with  so-called  inspired  em- 
ployers —  employers  who  work  harder  than  they  have  to, 
who  dote  on  the  great  human  difficulties  of  work,  who  choose 
not  the  easiest  but  the  most  perfect  way  of  doing  things,  who 
are  never  mechanical  themselves,  and  will  not  let  their  men  be 
if  they  can  help  it.  I  have  liked  to  call  these  employers  in- 
spired millionaires.  I  would  rather  have  the  machine  owner 
or  employer  a  millionaire,  because  the  more  machines  an 
inspired  employer  can  own,  the  more  he  can  buy  and  get  away 
from  the  uninspired  ones,  the  sooner  will  the  right  of  labour 


48  CROWDS 

and  the  will  of  the  people  be  accomplished.  When  the  machines 
are  in  the  hands  of  inspired  and  strong  and  spirited  men  — 
men  of  real  competence  or  genius  for  business,  the  machines  will 
be  seen  on  every  hand  around  us  as  the  engines  of  war  against 
evil,  against  slavery,  the  whirling  weapons  of  the  Spirit. 

Even  now,  in  dreams  have  I  stood  and  watched  them  — 
the  will  of  the  people  like  a  flail  in  their  mighty  hands  —  this 
vast  army  of  machines  —  go  thundering  past,  driving  the 
uninspired  and  mechanical  off  the  face  of  the  earth. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  STRIKE  — AN  INVENTION  FOR  MAKING 
CROWDS  THINK 

WHEN  I  was  arranging  to  slip  over  from  New  York  and  get 
something  I  very  much  wanted  in  England  last  spring,  I  found 
myself  held  up  suddenly  in  all  my  plans  because  some  men  on 
the  docks  had  decided  that  there  was  something  that  they 
wanted  too.  They  decided  that  I  and  thousands  of  other 
people  in  New  York  would  have  to  wait  over  on  the  shores  of 
America  until  they  got  it. 

After  postponing  my  plans  until  things  had  settled  down,  I 
took  passage,  and  in  due  time  found  myself  standing  on  Eng- 
Ush  soil,  only  to  be  informed  that,  while  I  might  be  allowed  per- 
haps at  least  to  stand  on  English  soil,  that  was  really  as  much  as 
I  could  expect.  I  could  not  go  anywhere  because  a  number  of 
men  on  the  railways  had  decided  that  there  was  something  they 
wanted  and  that  I  would  have  to  wait  till  they  got  it. 

I  could  go  down  and  look  at  the  silent,  cold  locomotives  on 
the  rails,  and  I  could  be  as  wistful  and  hopeful  as  I  liked 
about  getting  up  to  London,  but  these  men  had  decided  that 
there  was  something  that  they  wanted  and  I  must  wait 

I  could  not  think  of  anything  I  had  ever  done  to  these  men, 
and  what  had  Liverpool  and  London  done  to  them? 

After  I  was  duly  settled  in  London,  and  had  begun  to  get  into 
its  little  ways,  and  was  busily  driving  about  and  attending  to 
my  business  as  I  had  planned,  6,000  more  men  suddenly  wanted 
something,  brought  me  up  to  a  full  stop  one  rainy  day,  and  said 
that  they  had  decided  that  if  I  wanted  to  ride  I  would  have  to 
walk,  or  that  I  would  have  to  poke  dismally  about  in  a'bus,  or 

49 


50  CROWDS 

worm  ray  way  through  under  the  ground.  As  I  understood  it, 
there  was  something  that  they  wanted  and  something  that 
they  were  going  to  get;  and  while  of  course  in  a  way,  they 
recognized  that  there  might  be  something  that  I  wanted  too,  I 
would  have  to  wait  till  they  got  theirs. 

I  could  not  think  of  anything  I  had  ever  done  to  them,  nor 
could  I  see  what  the  thousands  of  other  good  people  in  London 
that  I  saw  walking  and  puddling  about,  or  watched  waiting 
twenty  minutes  or  so  with  long,  hopeful,  dogged  whistles  for 
cabs,  had  done  to  them. 

A  few  days  more,  and  my  morning  paper  tells  me  suddenly  of 
some  more  men  who  wanted  something  —  this  time  up  in 
Lancashire.  They  had  decided  that  they  wouldn't  let  some 
two  or  three  hundred  thousand  other  men  go  to  their  work  until 
they  got  it.  They  hushed  cities  to  have  their  own  way.  Day 
by  day  I  watched  them  throwing  the  silence  of  the  cities  in  their 
employers'  faces,  closing  shops,  closing  up  railroads,  telling 
the  world  it  must  pay  more  for  the  clothes  on  its  back,  and  all 
because  —  a  certain  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Riley  of  Accrington,  North 
Lancashire  did  not  like  or  did  not  think  that  they  liked,  the 
North  Lancashire  Trades  Union.  (The  general  idea  seemed  to 
be  to  have  all  the  others  join  in,  everywhere  —  fifty -four  mil- 
lion spindles,  and  four  hundred  and  forty  thousand  looms— and 
wait  and  keep  perfectly  still  until  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Riley  could 
make  up  their  minds. 

And  now  this  present  week,  morning  after  morning  I  take  up 
my  paper  and  read  that  500,000  miners  want  something.  I 
look  in  my  fire  dubiously  day  by  day.  I  may  have  to  go  home 
to  America  in  a  few  weeks  to  get  w^arm. 

Of  course  it  is  only  fair  to  say  at  the  outset  that  this  little 
series  of  impressions,  or  sketches,  as  one  may  say,  of  Civilization 
as  I  have  seen  it  since  arriving  in  England  are  of  such  a  nature 
that  I  need  not  have  come  over  to  England  to  observe  them. 
I  would  be  the  last  to  deny  that  the  same  conveniences  for 
being  disagreeable  and  for  getting  in  the  way  and  for  making  a 


INVENTIONS  FOR  MAKING  CROWDS  THINK    51 

general  muss  of  Life  can  be  offered  almost  any  time  in  my  own 
hopeful  and  blundering  country. 

What  more  immediately  concerns  me  in  these  things  is  that, 
having  happened,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  they  have  some 
valuable  and  worthy  meaning  for  me  and  for  other  people  that 
I  ought  to  get  out  of  them. 

One  cannot  stand  by  and  see  a  great  civilization  like  our  Eng- 
lish-speaking civiUzation,  with  its  ocean  liners,  cathedrals,  and 
aeroplanes,  being  undignified  and  inefficient  before  one's  eyes 
and  even  a  little  ridiculous,  without  trying  to  see  if  it  does  not 
serve  some  purpose.  There  must  be  something  beyond,  some- 
thing further  and  deeper,  something  newborn  about  it,  which 
shall  be  worth  our  while.  Strikes  seem  to  be  common  people's 
way  of  thinking  things  out.  If  they  had  more  imagination,  they 
would  know  what  they  were  going  to  think  beforehand,  without 
so  much  trouble  perhaps;  but  so  long  as  they  have  not,  and  so 
long  as  it  is  really  true  perhaps  that  all  these  millions  of  levers 
;md  wheels  and  engines  will  have  to  be  stopped,  so  that  the 
rich  mechanical-minded  people  who  own  them  and  the  poor 
mechanical-minded  people  who  work  with  them  can  think 
better,  we  will  have  to  be  glad  at  least  that  they  are  thinking, 
and  we  will  have  to  hope  that  they  are  thinking  fast,  and  will 
soon  have  it  over  with.  In  the  meantime,  while  they  are 
thinking,  we  can  think  too. 

It  is  never  fair  to  lump  people  together,  and  there  are  always 
exceptions  and  special  reasons  to  consider;  but,  speaking  roughly, 
it  is  fair  to  lay  it  down  as  a  general  principle  that  it  is  apt  to  be 
the  more  common  kind  of  employers  and  employees  who  find  it 
difficult  to  think,  and  who  need  strikes  to  think  with.  Wlien 
we  see  175,000  weavers  striking  in  Lancashire,  and  the  Trades 
Unions  insisting  on  the  discharge  of  Non-Union  men,  and 
employers  being  willing  to  recognize  the  Unions  but  being  un- 
willing to  be  controlled  by  them,  most  of  us  find  ourselves  tak- 
ing sides  very  quickly.  We  are  often  amazed  to  see  how  quickly 
we  take  sides,  and  what  amazes  some  of  us  most  is  our  apparent 


52  CROWDS 

inconsistency.  We  find  ourselves  now  on  the  Union  side  and 
now  on  the  employer  side  in  the  dispute  between  Capital  and 
Labour.  We  never  know  when  we  take  up  the  morning  paper, 
some  of  us,  which  side  will  be  our  next;  and  very  often,  if  we 
were  suddenly  asked  why,  on  reading  quietly  about  a  new  dis- 
pute in  the  morning  paper,  we  had  taken  promptly  one  side 
rather  than  the  other,  almost  unconsciously,  before  we  knew  it 
we  would  not  perhaps  be  able  to  say  at  once.  The  other  day  I 
became  a  little  alarmed  at  myself  at  what  looked  at  first  like  a 
kind  of  moral  weakness,  and  inability  to  stand  still  on  one  side 
or  the  other  in  the  contest  between  Labour  and  Capital;  and 
I  tried  to  think  my  way  sternly  through,  and  decide  why  it  was 
my  mind  seemed  to  waver  from  one  side  to  the  other,  and  seemed 
so  inconsistent  and  inefiicient. 

It  seems  to  me  I  have  just  discovered  a  certain  thread  of 
consistency,  as  I  look  back  over  many  disputes. 

As  near  as  I  can  remember,  I  find  the  side  that  uses  force,  or 
that  uses  the  most  force,  invariably  turns  me  against  it.  If, 
as  I  read,  I  find  that  both  sides  are  using  force,  I  find  myself 
against  both  sides.  I  find  myself  wishing,  in  spite  of  my  dis- 
like of  Socialism,  that  the  nation  had  the  power,  when  a  quarrel- 
some industry  turns  to  the  people  in  the  street  and  stops  them 
in  what  they  are  doing,  and  tells  the  people  in  the  street  that 
they  cannot  ride,  or  that  they  shall  not  sleep,  or  that  they  can- 
not eat  —  when  a  quarrelsome  industry  insists  on  keeping  the 
whole  world  up  all  night  because  it  has  a  Stomach  Ache,  I  feel 
suddenly  that  the  people  ought  to  be  able  to  take  the  industry 
away  and  put  it  into  such  hands  that  the  people  in  the  streets 
will  be  protected;  into  hands  that  will  make  the  industry  be- 
have so  that  it  won't  have  a  stomach  ache.  An  industry  with 
a  stomach  ache  always  has  it  because  somebody  in  it  has  been 
over-eating  and  getting  more  than  their  share,  and  is  incom- 
petent and  unfit;  and  obviously  it  should  have  its  freedom,  its 
privilege  of  selecting  its  food,  taken  away  from  it  until  it  be- 
haves. 


INVENTIONS  FOR  MAKING  CROWDS  THINK   53 

Always  allowing  for  exceptions,  we  may  put  it  down  as  a 
general  truth  that,  when  we  find  a  cause  using  force  or  mere 
advantage  of  position,  it  is  because  there  is  incompetence  or 
lack  of  brains  in  those  who  conduct  it,  and  the  cure  lies,  not  in 
more  force,  but  in  more  brains.  One  cannot  help  being  angered 
by  force,  because  one  knows  that  it  is  not  only  not  a  remedy, 
but  is  itself  the  cause  of  all  incompetence  and  blindness  in  busi- 
ness. Force  merely  heaps  the  incompetence  and  blindness  up, 
postpones  co-operation,  defeats  the  mutual  interest  which  is  the 
very  substance  of  business  efficiency  in  a  nation.  Force  is  itself 
the  injury  mounting  up  more  and  more,  which  it  seeks  to  cure. 

The  most  hkely  way  to  prevent  industrial  trouble  would 
seem  to  be  to  have  employers  and  managers  and  foremen  who 
have  a  genius  for  getting  men  to  trust  and  believe  in  them.  We 
are  getting  smoke-consumers,  computing  machines,  and  the 
next  contrivance  is  going  to  be  the  employer  who  has  the  under- 
standing spirit,  and  who  sees  the  cash  value  of  human  genius, 
the  value  in  the  market  of  genius  for  being  fair  and  getting  on 
with  people.  Arbitration  boards  are  at  best  (as  they  them- 
selves would  say)  stupid  and  negative  things,  and  though  bet- 
ter than  nothing,  as  a  rule  merely  postpone  evil  or  change 
symptoms.  No  one  can  ever  really  arbitrate  for  any  one  else 
either  in  industry  or  marriage  except  for  a  moment.  The 
trouble  hes  deep  down  inside  the  people  who  keep  needing 
arbitration.  As  long  as  these  people  are  still  there,  and  as  long 
as  incompetent  employers  or  employees  are  there,  there  is  bound 
to  be  trouble. 

Turning  out  incompetent  employers  and  incompetent  la- 
bourers is  the  only  way.  We  are  getting  rid  of  them  as  rapidly 
as  possible.  All  business  in  the  last  resort  turns  on  brains  for 
being  human  and  understanding  people.  Business,  as  people 
say,  is  partly  business  and  business  is  partly  economics,  but 
more  than  anything  else,  in  modern  times,  business  is  psy- 
chology. 

Success  is  the  science  of  being  believed  in.     Incompetent 


54  CROWDS 

employers  and  incompetent  labourers  are  already  being  turned 
out,  and  are  bound  to  be  turned  out  implacably  more  and  more, 
by  the  competitive  nature  of  modern  business.  Under  present 
conditions,  if  we  have  in  each  industry  one  single  competent 
employing  firm,  with  brains  for  being  fair  and  brains  for  being 
far-sighted,  and  for  being  thoughtful  of  others  —  in  short,  with 
brains  for  being  believed  in  —  the  control  of  that  industry  soon 
falls  into  their  hands.  People  who  use  force  instead  of  brains 
are  second-rate,  are  out  of  the  spirit  of  the  times,  and  are  going 
by.  And  this  seems  to  be  the  spirit,  too,  which  is  to  govern  the 
more  efficient  Labour  Unions  as  well  as  the  more  efficient  Trusts. 
If  it  were  possible  to  collect  the  names  in  England  and  Amer- 
ica of  the  men  in  each  industry  where  brains  were  being  per- 
sonally believed  in,  we  would  have  a  list  of  the  leaders  of 
England  and  America  for  the  next  fifty  years.  Having  a  soul  in 
business  pays,  not  because  it  affords  a  fine  motive  power,  but 
because  it  affords  a  practical  and  conclusive  method  of  driving 
the  devil  out  of  business.  He  is  being  driven  out  of  industry, 
one  industry  at  a  time,  by  men  who  get  on  better  without  him; 
and  this  is  going  to  go  on  until  the  abihty  to  do  this  —  to  crowd 
out  the  devil,  to  get  the  devil  out  of  machines  and  factories,  out 
of  the  machinery  of  organization  —  the  power  to  keep  the  devil 
out  of  things  and  out  of  people,  is  recognized  by  everybody  as 
the  greatest,  most  subtle,  most  victorious  and  universal  market- 
value  in  the  world.  The  men  who  can  be  believed  in  most  will 
get  the  most  business,  and,  what  is  still  more  important,  the 
men  who  can  make  men  believe  in  them  most  will  be  able  to  hire 
the  employees  who  can  be  believed  in  most,  and  will  get  a 
monopoly  of  the  efficiency  of  the  world;  and  though  the  men 
who  can  be  believed  in  less  may  be  able  to  continue  for  a  time 
to  do  their  work  and  go  through  aU  their  old  motions  as  well  as 
they  can,  with  all  their  old  lumbering,  pathetic  machinery  of 
watching  each  other  and  suspecting  each  other  and  fighting 
each  other  humped  up  on  their  backs,  they  can  never  hope  to 
compete  with  free-moving,  honest  men,  who  deal  directly  and 


INVENTIONS  FOR  MAKING  CROWDS  THINK    55 

openly  and  in  a  few  words  for  their  employees,  jobbers,  con- 
sumers, and  the  public,  without  any  vast  machinery  of  sus- 
picion to  bother  with.  It  is  a  most  curious,  local,  temporary, 
back-county  idea,  the  idea  that,  for  sheer  industrial  economy, 
for  simple  cheap  conclusive  finance,  there  is  anything  on  earth 
in  business  that  will  take  the  place  of  old-fashioned  human 
personal  prestige  —  the  prestige  of  the  man  who  has  a  genius 
for  being  believed  in. 

In  a  way,  perhaps  the  recent  strike  among  the  London  cab- 
men is  an  instance  of  what  is  really  the  essential  issue  in  every 
strike.  The  bottom  fact  about  the  taxi  chauffeurs,  stated 
simply,  was  that  they  did  not  beheve  in  their  employers.  They 
believed  that,  if  the  precise  figures  were  known,  their  employers 
were  getting  more  than  their  share.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
bottom  fact  about  the  employers  was  that  they  did  not  and 
could  not  believe  that,  if  the  precise  figures  were  known,  the 
cabmen  were  not  getting  more  than  their  share.  They  insisted 
that  the  cabmen  should  publish,  or  make  known,  the  precise 
figures  of  their  extras.  The  cabmen  declined  to  do  it,  and  it 
made  them  look  for  the  moment  perhaps  as  if  they  were  wrong. 
But  were  they  necessarily  wrong.-*  Was  it  really  true  that 
they  had  any  more  reason  to  trust  their  employers  than  their 
employers  had  to  trust  them?  The  cabmen  might  quite  hon- 
estly and  justly  have  said  to  the  owners:  "WTiat  we  want  is 
an  honest,  impeccable  little  dividend-recorder  fastened  on  the 
back  of  every  owner,  as  well  as  on  our  machines  and  on  us. 
Then  we  will  publish  our  extras." 

The  determining  and  important  fact  of  economics  in  the  last 
analysis  always  turns  out  to  be  some  human  fact,  some  fact 
about  people.  It  is  really  true  that  just  now,  in  the  present 
half-stage  of  machine-industry,  employers  should  nearly  all 
be  compelled  to  go  about  in  this  world  with  fare-recorders  on 
their  backs.  Employees  too.  This  would  be  the  logical  thing 
to  do;  and  as  it  is  impracticable,  and  as  every  business  must  have 
tertain  elements  of  secrecy  in  it  in  order  to  be  competent,  the 


56  CROWDS 

only  alternative  is  to  have  in  charge  men  with  enough  genius 
for  being  believed  in  and  for  taking  measures  to  be  believed  in 
—  to  keep  employees  believing  in  them,  in  spite  of  secrecy. 
Under  these  conditions,  it  cannot  be  long  before  we  will  see  in 
every  business  the  men  being  put  forward  on  both  sides  who 
have  a  genius  for  being  believed  in.  Managers  and  superin- 
tendents will  be  put  in  office  everywhere  who  see  the  cash 
value,  the  economy,  of  the  simple,  old-fashioned  power  in  a 
man  of  a  genius  for  being  believed  in;  employers  with  the  power 
of  inspiring  more  and  better  work  from  their  workmen;  Labour 
men  with  the  power  of  inspiring  employers  to  believe  in  them, 
of  inspiring  their  employers  to  put  up  money,  stock,  or  profits 
on  their  belief  —  on  the  belief  that  workmen  are  capable  of  the 
highest  quahties  of  manhood:  hard  work,  loyalty,  persistence, 
and  faith  toward  a  common  end.  I  have  preferred  to  have 
this  inspired  employer  a  millionaire,  because  the  more  capital 
he  has  the  more  men  he  can  employ,  and  the  more  rapidly 
the  other  kind  of  millionaire,  the  blind,  old-fashioned  butter  of 
Labour,  will  be  driven  out  of  business. 

Little  can  be  done  with  one  book,  but  at  this  special  juncture, 
this  psychological  moment  for  copartnership  and  the  spirit  of 
copartnership,  when  all  the  world  is  touched  to  the  quick  by 
great  strikes  —  at  a  time  when  one  can  sit  still  and  almost  hear 
the  nations  think  —  there  are  some  of  us  who  hope  that  the  case 
we  are  trying  to  make  out  for  copartnership  between  Capital 
and  Labour  will  be  of  use  to  those  who  are  trying  to  do  things, 
and  who  for  the  moment  find  themselves  foiled  at  every  point 
by  men  who  have  given  up  believing  in  human  nature.  We 
wish  to  put  ourselves  on  record,  and  to  say  that  we  do  believe  in 
human  nature,  and  that  we  believe  not  only  that  the  inspired 
employer  is  going  to  be  evolved  by  the  Crowd,  but  that  the 
Crowd  is  going  to  recognize  him  and  is  going  to  take  sides  with 
him,  and  that  the  Crowd  is  going  to  justify  him,  make  him  suc- 
ceed, is  going  to  make  his  success  its  own  success.  In  other 
words,  we  believe  in  heroes,  crowds,  and  goodness;  in  men  of 


INVENTIONS  FOR  MAKING  CROWDS  THINK   57 

heroic  gifts  —  who  are  fit  and  meet  to  interpret  the  wills  and 
desires  of  crowds  —  who  are  great  men  or  Crowd-Men,  crowds 
in  spirit  themselves. 

I  would  like  to  try  to  express  the  type  of  modern  man  who,  as 
it  seems  to  me,  is  about  to  prove  himself  the  real  ruler  of  our 
modern  world,  the  silent  master  of  what  the  crowds  shall  think. 
It  has  seemed  to  me  that  it  is  going  to  be  a  man  of  a  marked 
type,  and  of  a  particular  temperament,  to  whom  we  will  have 
to  look  in  our  new  and  crowded  world  for  the  crowd-interpreter, 
or  man  who  touches  the  imagination  of  crowds. 

As  our  whole  labour  problem  to-day  turns  on  our  being  able 
to  touch  the  imagination  of  Crowds,  it  may  not  be  uninteresting 
in  the  next  chapter  to  consider  what  a  man  who  can  do  this  will 
probably  be  hke  and  the  spirit  in  which  he  will  do  it. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  CROWD-MAN  — AN  INVENTION  FOR 
MAKING  CROWDS  SEE 

WHEN  Wilbur  Wright  flew  around  the  Statue  of  Liberty  in 
New  York  the  other  day,  his  doing  it  was  a  big  event;  but  a  still 
bigger  event,  as  it  seems  to  some  of  us,  was  the  way  he  felt 
about  New  York  when  he  did  it.  All  New  York  could  not  make 
him  show  off.  Hundreds  of  thousands  of  people  on  roofs  could 
look  up  at  the  sky  over  New  York,  for  him  to  go  by,  all  that  they 
liked.  He  slipped  down  to  Washington  without  saying  any- 
thing, on  the  3 :  25  train,  to  attend  to  flying  as  part  of  the  serious 
business  of  the  world. 

Why  fly  around  a  little  town  like  New  York,  or  show  your 
bright  wings  in  the  light,  or  circle  the  Statue  of  Liberty  for 
fun,  when  you  are  reconstructing  civilization,  and  binding  a 
whole  planet  together,  and  wrapping  the  heavens  close  down 
around  the  earth,  and  making  railroads  everywhere  out  of  the 
sdr?  New  York  is  always  a  little  superficial  and  funny  about 
itself.  All  it  needs  to  do,  it  seems  to  think,  is  to  snap  its  fingers 
at  a  man  of  genius  anywhere  on  this  broad  world,  whisper  to 
him  pleasantly,  and  he  will  trot  promptly  up,  of  course,  and  do 
his  little  turn  for  it. 

But  not  Wilbur  Wright.  Wilbur  Wright  would  not  give  two 
million  people  an  encore,  or  even  come  back  to  bow.  As  one 
looked  over  from  Mount  Tom  one  could  see  all  New  York  black 
and  solid  on  the  tops  of  its  roofs  and  houses  looking  up  into  a 
great  hole  of  air  for  him,  and  Wilbur  Wright  slipping  quietly 
off  down  to  Washington  and  leaving  them  there,  a  whole  great 
city  under  the  sky,  with  its  heads  up ! 

58 


INVENTIONS  FOR  IVIAKING  CROWDS  SEE      59 

A  little  experience  like  this  has  been  what  New  York  has 
needed  for  a  long  time.  It  takes  a  scientist  to  do  these  things. 
I  wish  there  were  some  poet  who  would  do  as  well.  Even  a 
prophet  up  above  New  York  —  or  seer  of  men  and  of  years  — 
glinting  his  wings  in  the  Hght,  the  New  York  Sun  and  the  World 
and  the  Times  down  below,  all  their  opera-glasses  trained  on 
him,  and  all  those  little  funny  reporters  running  helplessly 
about,  all  the  people  pouring  out  from  Doctor  Parkhurst's 
church  to  look  up.     ...     It  would  be  something. 

Probably  there  are  very  few  capitals  in  the  world  —  Paris, 
Berlin,  or  London  —  that  would  not  be  profoundly  stirred  and 
possibly  much  improved  by  having  some  mansuddenly  appear 
up  over  them,  who  would  be  so  interested  in  what  he  was  doing 
that  he  would  forget  to  notice  whether  anybody  was  looking  — 
who  would  be  capable  of  slipping  off  quietly  and  leaving  an 
entire  city  with  its  heads  up,  and  going  on  and  attending  to 
business. 

There  have  been  times  when  we  would  have  been  relieved, 
some  of  us,  if  the  North  Pole  could  have  been  discovered  in  this 
way  and  without  large  audiences  tagging.  There  are  some  of 
us  who  will  never  cease  to  regret  as  long  as  we  live  that  the 
North  Pole  could  not  have  waited  a  little.  We  would  rather 
have  had  Wilbur  Wright  discover  it.  One  can  imagine  how  he 
would  do  it :  fly  gracefully  up  to  it  all  by  himself,  and  discover  it 
some  pleasant  evening,  and  have  it  over  with,  and  slip  back  on 
his  soft  wings  in  the  night,  and  not  say  anything  about  it.  It 
is  this  Wilbur  Wright  spirit  that  I  would  like  to  dwell  on  in  these 
pages.  It  seems  to  me  it  is  a  true  modern  spirit,  the  spirit 
which  alone  could  make  our  civilization  great,  and  the  spirit 
which  alone  could  make  crowds  great.  It  was  the  crowd  that 
spoiled  the  way  the  Pole  was  discovered  —  all  the  millions  of 
people,  vast,  thoughtless  audiences  piling  in  and  making  a  show 
of  it.  Many  people  in  America,  all  the  vast  crowds  reading 
about  it,  seemed  to  feel  that  they  were  more  important  than  the 
Pole;  and  when  Captain  Peary  came  back,  vast  crowds  of  these 


60  CROWDS 

same  people  paid  as  much  as  five  dollars  apiece  for  the  privilege 
of  being  in  the  same  room  with  him.  It  was  quite  impossible 
not  to  contrast  Captain  Peary  in  his  attitude  toward  the  crowd 
and  Wilbur  Wright.  There  seemed  to  be,  and  there  will  always 
remain,  a  certain  vulgarity  in  the  way  the  North  Pole  was  dis- 
covered, and  the  way  the  whole  world  behaved  in  regard  to  it, 
and  the  secret  seems  to  have  been  in  Captain  Peary's  failure  to 
be  a  Wilbur  Wright.  He  allowed  the  Pole  to  be  a  Crowd  affair. 
All  the  while  as  he  went  about  the  country  holding  his  little 
exhibits  of  the  tip  of  the  planet  we  could  not  help  wishing,  many 
of  us  who  were  in  the  Audience,  that  this  man  who  sat  there 
before  us,  the  man  who  had  the  Thing  in  his  hand,  who  had  col- 
lected the  North  Pole,  would  not  notice  us,  would  snub  us  if 
need  be  a  little,  and  would  leave  these  people,  these  millions  of 
people,  with  their  heads  up  and  go  quietly  on  to  the  South  Pole 
and  collect  that.  It  is  because  there  are  thousands  of  men  who 
understand  just  how  Wilbur  Wright  felt  when  he  slipped  away 
the  other  day  in  New  York  and  left  the  entire  city  with  its 
heads  up  that  we  have  every  reason  to  expect  that  the  crowd 
is  to  produce  great  leaders,  and  is  to  become  a  great  crowd, 
great  and  humble  in  spirit  before  God,  before  the  stars,  and  the 
atoms,  and  the  microbes,  and  before  Itself.  In  the  meantime, 
however,  we  see  all  about  us  in  the  world  countless  would-be 
leaders  of  the  crowd,  who  would  perhaps  not  quite  understand 
the  way  Wilbur  Wright  felt  that  day  when  he  slipped  away  from 
New  York  and  left  the  entire  city  with  its  heads  up.  Most 
newspaper  men  —  men  who  are  in  the  habit  of  writing  for  a 
crowd  and  regarding  a  crowd  quite  respectfully  —  will  have 
wondered  a  little  why  Wilbur  Wright  could  have  let  such  a 
crowd  go  by.  Most  actors  and  theatrical  people  would  have 
stayed  over  a  train  or  so  and  given  one  more  little  performance 
with  all  those  wistful  people  on  the  roof-tops.  There  are  only 
a  very  few  clergymen  in  England  or  America  to-day  who,  with 
a  great  audience  like  that  and  so  many  men  in  it,  would  ever 
have  thought  of  slipping  off  on  the  3 :25  train  in  the  way  Wilbur 


INVENTIONS  FOR  MAKING  CROWDS  SEE       61 

Wright  did.  The  ministers  and  the  politicians  of  all  countries 
are  still  wondering  a  little  —  if  they  ever  thought  of  it  —  how 
Wright  did  it.  Most  of  the  other  people  in  the  world  wonder 
a  little,  too,  but  I  imagine  that  the  great  inventors  of  the  world 
who  read  about  it  the  next  morning  did  not  wonder.  The 
true  scientists,  in  this  country  and  in  Germany  and  in  France, 
all  understood  just  how  Wilbur  Wright  felt  when  he  left  New 
York  with  its  heads  up.  The  great  artists  of  the  world,  in  litera- 
ture, in  painting,  and  architecture;  the  great  railroad  builders, 
the  city  builders,  the  nation  builders,  the  great  statesmen,  the 
great  biologists,  and  chemists,  understood.  James  J.  Hill,  with 
his  face  toward  the  Pacific,  understood.  Alexander  Graham 
Bell,  out  abroad  doing  the  listening  and  talking  and  thinking 
the  thoughts  of  eighty  million  people,  understood.  Marconi, 
making  the  ships  whisper  across  the  sea,  and  William  G. 
McAdoo,  shooting  a  hundred  and  seventy  thousand  people  a 
day  through  a  hole  under  the  Hudson  —  understood. 

And  God, fvhen  He  made  the  world.  And  Columbus  when  he 
discovered  America.  And  Jesus  Christ  when  He  was  so  happy 
and  so  preoccupied  over  His  vision  of  a  new  world,  over  invent- 
ing Christianity,  that  it  seemed  a  very  small  and  incidental  thing 
to  die  on  the  Cross  —  He  understood. 

Wilbur  Wright's  secret  was  that  he  had  a  vision.  His  vision 
was  that  a  human  being  could  be  greater  and  more  powerful 
than  the  world  had  ever  believed  before. 

Just  to  be  there  was  a  great  thought,  to  be  allowed  to  be  one 
of  those  admitted,  to  be  present  at  the  first  faint  beginning,  the 
first  still  alighting  of  the  human  spirit  from  the  earth  upon  the 
sky.  AVilbur  Wright  made  the  most  ordinary  man  a  genius 
a  minute.  He  made  him  wonder  softly  who  he  was  —  and  the 
people  all  about  him  —  who  were  they?  and  what  would  they 
think,  and  what  would  they  do  next?  The  first  flash  of  light  on 
the  wings  was  a  thousand  years.  It  was  as  if  almost  for  a 
moment  he  saw  at  last  the  whole  earth  about  him.  History, 
churches,  factories  on  it,  slipping  out  of  its  cocoon  at  last  —  its 


62  CROWDS 

little,  old,  faded,  tied-down  cocoon,  and  sailing  upon  the  air  — 
sailing  with  him,  sailing  with  the  churches,  with  the  factories, 
and  with  the  schools,  with  History,  through  the  Invisible, 
through  the  Intangible  —  out  to  the  Sun.     .     .     . 


Perhaps  the  reason  that  New  York  was  a  great  city  a  few 
minutes  the  other  day  when  Wilbur  Wright  was  there  was  that 
Wilbur  Wright  had  a  new  vision  in  the  presence  of  all  those  men 
of  something  that  they  could  do.  He  touched  the  imagination 
of  men  about  themselves.  They  were  profoundly  moved  be- 
cause they  saw  him  in  their  presence  inventing  a  new  kind  and 
new  size  of  human  being.  He  raised  the  standard  of  impos- 
sibility, and  built  an  annex  on  to  the  planet  while  they  looked; 
took  a  great  strip  off  of  space  three  miles  wide  and  folded  it 
softly  on  to  the  planet  all  the  way  round  before  their  eyes.  For 
three  miles  more  —  three  miles  farther  up  above  the  ground  — 
there  was  a  space  where  human  beings  would  have  to  stop  say- 
ing, "I  can't,"  and  "You  can't,"  and  "We  can't."  If  people 
want  to  say  "I  can't,"  and  "  You  can't,''  they  will  have  to  say 
it  farther  and  farther  away  from  this  planet  now.  Let  them 
try  Mars.  The  modern  imagination  takes  to  impossibilities 
naturally  with  Wilbur  Wright  against  the  horizon.  The  thing 
we  next  cannot  believe  is  the  next  thing  to  expect. 

Nobody  would  have  believed  ten  years  ago  that  an  architect 
could  be  invented  who  would  tell  a  man  that  his  house  would 
cost  him  thirty  thousand  dollars,  and  then  hand  him  back  two 
thousand  dollars  when  he  had  finished  it.  But  the  man  had 
been  invented  —  he  invented  himself. 

He  represents  the  owner,  and  does  as  the  owner  would  be  done 
by  if  he  did  it  himself  —  if  he  had  the  technical  knowledge  and 
the  time  to  do  it. 

Nobody  would  have  believed  a  few  years  ago  that  a  railway 
president,  when  he  had  occasion  to  reduce  the  wages  of  several 
thousand  employees  10  per  cent,  would  begin  by  reducing  his 


INVENTIONS  FOR  MAKING  CROWDS  SEE       63 

own  salary  30  per  cent,  and  the  salary  of  all  the  officials  all  the 
way  down  15  per  cent,  or  20  per  cent. 

Nobody  would  have  believed  some  time  ago  that  an  organiz- 
ing inventor  would  be  evolved  who  would  meet  his  directors  and 
tell  them  that,  if  they  would  have  their  work  done  in  their 
mills  in  three  shifts  instead  of  two,  the  men  would  work  so  much 
better  that  it  would  not  cost  the  Company  more  than  10  per 
cent,  more  to  offer  the  better  conditions.  But  such  an  organizing 
inventor  has  been  invented,  and  has  proved  his  case. 

Luther  Burbank  has  made  a  chestnut  tree  eighteen  months 
old  bear  chestnuts;  and  it  has  always  taken  from  ten  to  twenty- 
five  years  to  make  a  tree  furnish  its  first  chestnut  before. 

About  the  same  time  that  Luther  Burbank  had  succeeded 
in  doing  this  with  chestnuts  a  similar  type  of  man,  who  was  not 
particularly  interested  in  chestnuts  and  wanted  to  do  something 
with  human  nature,  who  believed  that  human  nature  could 
really  be  made  to  work,  found  a  certain  staple  article  that  every- 
body needs  every  day  in  a  state  of  anarchy  in  the  market.  The 
producers  were  not  making  anything  on  it.  The  wholesalers 
dealt  in  it  without  a  profit,  and  the  retailers  sold  it  without  a 
profit,  and  merely  because  the  other  things  they  sold  were 
worthless  without  it. 

,  who  was  the  leading  wholesale  dealer  and  in  the  best 

position  to  act,  pointed  out  that,  if  the  business  was  organized 
and  everybody  in  it  would  combine  with  everybody  else  and 
make  it  a  monopoly,  the  price  could  be  made  lower,  and  every- 
body would  make  money. 

Of  course  this  was  a  platitude. 

It  was  also  a  platitude  that  human  nature  was  not  good 
enough,  and  could  not  be  trusted  to  work  properly  in  a  mo- 
nopoly. 

then   proceeded   to   invent   a  monopoly  —  a   kind   of 

monopoly  in  which  human  nature  could  be  trusted. 

He  used  a  very  simple  device. 

He  began  by  being  trusted  himself. 


64  CROWDS 

Having  personally  and  directly  proved  that  human  nature  in 
a  monopoly  could  be  trusted  by  being  trusted  himself,  all  he 
had  to  do  was  to  capitalize  his  knowledge  of  human  nature,  use 
the  enormous  market  value  of  the  trust  people  had  in  him  to 
gather  people  about  him  in  the  business  who  had  a  good  prac- 
tical business  genius  for  being  trusted  too  and  for  keeping 
trusted :  everybody  else  was  shut  out. 

The  letter  with  which  the  monopoly  was  started  (after  deal- 
ing duly  with  the  technical  details  of  the  business)  ended  like 
this: 

" .  .  .  the  soundest  lines  of  business  —  viz.,  fair  prices, 
fair  profits,  fair  division  of  profits,  fair  recognition  of  service 
do  as  you  would  be  done  by,  money  back  where  it  is  practicable, 
one's  profit  so  small  as  to  make  competition  not  worth  while, 
open  dealing,  and  open  books." 

He  had  invented  a  monopoly  which  shared  its  profits  with 
the  people,  and  which  the  people  trusted.  He  was  a  Luther 
Burbank  in  money  and  people  instead  of  chestnuts.  He  raised 
the  standard  of  impossibility  in  people,  and  invented  a  new  way 
for  human  nature  to  work. 


CHAPTER  VI 
THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS 

THE  modern  imagination  takes,  speaking  roughly,  three 
characteristic  forms: 

1.  Imagination  about  the  unseen  or  intangible  —  the  spiritual 
—  as  especially  typified  in  electricity,  in  the  wireless  telegraph, 
the  aeroplane:  a  new  and  extraordinary  sense  of  the  invisible 
and  the  unproved  as  an  energy  to  be  used  and  reckoned  with, 

2.  Imagination  about  the  future  —  a  new  and  extraordinary 
sense  of  what  is  going  to  happen  next  in  the  world. 

3.  Imagination  about  people.  We  are  not  only  inventing 
new  machines,  but  our  new  machines  have  turned  upon  us  and 
are  creating  new  men.  The  telephone  changes  the  structure  of 
the  brain.  Men  live  in  wider  distances,  and  think  in  larger 
figures,  and  become  eligible  to  nobler  and  wider  motives. 

Imagination  about  the  unseen  is  going  to  give  us  in  an  in- 
credible degree  the  mastery  of  the  spirit  over  matter. 

Imagination  about  the  future  is  going  to  make  the  next  few 
hundred  years  an  organic  part  of  every  man's  life  to-day. 

The  imagination  of  men  about  themselves  and  other  people 
is  going  to  give  us  a  race  of  men  with  new  motives;  or,  to  put 
it  differently,  it  is  going  to  give  us  not  only  new  sizes  but  new 
kinds  of  men.  People  are  going  to  achieve  impossibilities  in 
goodness,  and  our  inventions  in  human  nature  are  going  to  keep 
up  with  our  other  inventions. 


65 


CHAPTER  VII 
IMAGINATION  ABOUT  THE  UNSEEN 

THE  most  distinctively  modern  thing  that  ever  happened 
was  when  Benjamin  FrankHn  went  out  one  day  and  called  down 
lightning  from  heaven.  Before  that,  power  had  always  been 
dug  up,  or  scraped  off  the  ground.  The  more  power  you  wanted 
the  more  you  had  to  get  hold  of  the  ground  and  dig  for  it; 
and  the  more  solid  you  were,  the  more  heavy,  solid  things  you 
could  get,  the  more  you  could  pull  solid,  heavy  things  round 
in  this  world  where  you  wanted  them.  Franklin  turned  to 
the  sky,  and  turned  power  on  from  above,  and  decided  that 
the  real  and  the  solid  and  the  substantial  in  this  world  was  to  be 
pulled  about  by  the  Invisible. 

Copernicus  had  the  same  idea,  of  course,  when  he  fared  forth 
into  space,  and  discovered  the  centre  of  all  power  to  be  in  the 
sun.  It  grieved  people  a  good  deal  to  find  how  much  more 
important  the  sky  was  than  they  were,  and  their  whole  little 
planet  with  all  of  them  on  it.  The  idea  that  that  big  blue  field 
up  there,  empty  by  day  and  with  such  crowds  of  little  faint  dots 
in  it  all  night,  was  the  real  thing  —  the  big,  final,  and  important 
thing  —  and  that  they  and  their  churches  and  popes  and  pyra- 
mids and  nations  should  just  dance  about  it  for  millions  of  years 
like  a  mote  in  a  sunbeam,  hurt  their  feelings  at  first.  But  it 
did  them  good.  It  started  them  looking  Up,  and  looking  the 
other  way  for  power. 

Very  soon  afterward  Columbus  enlarged  upon  the  same  idea 
by  starting  the  world  toward  very  far  things,  on  the  ground;  and 
he  bored  through  the  skylines,  a  thousand  skylines,  and  spread 
the  nations  upon  the  sea.     Columbus  was  the  typical  modern 

66 


IMAGINATION  ABOUT  THE  UNSEEN  67 

man  led  by  the  invisible,  the  intangible;  and  on  the  great  waters 
somewhere  between  Spain  and  New  York,  between  the  old  and 
the  new,  Columbus  discovered  the  Future  Tense — the  centrifugal 
tense,  the  tense  that  sweeps  men's  souls  out  through  the  un- 
known, out  into  space,  out  into  hope,  out  into  faith,  and  flings 
the  unknown  around  the  lives  of  men.  The  mere  fastened-down 
stable  things,  the  mere  actual  facts,  stopped  being  the  world 
with  Columbus,  and  men  were  flung  free  and  swift  and  the 
air  and  the  sky  went  past  like  windows,  began  (like  hills  in  a 
train)  to  be  swept  through  the  hearts,  the  acts,  and  the  thoughts 
of  men  and  of  women,  .  ,  .  Then  miners,  mariners,  explorers, 
inventors  —  the  impossible  steamship,  the  railway,  the  impos- 
sible cotton-gin  and  sewing-machine  and  reaper,  Hoosac  tun- 
nels and  Atlantic  cables.  The  impossible  became  one  of  the 
habits  of  modern  life. 

Of  course  the  sky  and  the  air  and  the  unknown  and  the  future 
had  been  recognized  before,  but  only  a  little  and  in  a  rather 
patronizing  way.  But  when  a  world  has  made  a  great,  solid 
continent  by  following  a  horizon  line,  it  begins  to  take  things 
just  beyond  very  seriously.  And  so  our  Time  has  been  fulfilled. 
We  have  had  the  stone  age;  we  have  had  the  iron  age;  and  now 
we  have  the  sky  age,  and  the  sky  telegraph,  and  sky  men,  and 
sky  cities.  Mountains  of  stone  are  built  out  of  men's  visions. 
Towers  and  skyscrapers  swing  up  out  of  their  wills  and  up  out 
of  their  hearts. 

Not  long  ago,  as  I  was  coming  away  from  New  York  in  the 
Springfield  Express,  which  was  running  at  fifty-five  miles  an 
hour,  I  saw  suddenly  some  smoke  coming  up  apparently  out  of 
a  satchel  on  the  floor;  belonging  to  the  man  in  the  chair  in  front 
of  me.  I  moved  the  satchel  away,  and  the  smoke  came  up 
through  the  carpet.  I  spoke  to  the  Pullman  conductor  who  was 
passing  through,  and  in  a  second  the  train  had  stopped,  and 
the  great  wild  roaring  Thing  had  ceased,  and  we  stood  in  a  long, 
wide,  white  silence  in  the  fields.  We  got  off  the  car  —  some  of 
us  —  to  see  what  had  happened,  and  to  see  if  there  was  a  hot  box 


68  CROT\T)S 

on  the  wheels.  We  found  that  the  entire  underside  of  the  floor 
of  the  car  was  on  fire,  and  what  had  happened?  Nothing  except 
a  new  impossibhty ;  nothing  except  that  a  human  being  had 
invented  an  electrical  locomotive  so  powerful  that  it  was  pulling 
that  train  fifty-five  miles  an  hour  while  the  brakes  on  the  car 
were  set  —  twelve  brakes  all  grinding  twenty  miles  on  those 
twelve  wheels;  and  the  locomotive  paid  no  more  attention  to 
the  brakes  of  that  heavy  Pullman  than  it  would  to  a  feather  or 
to  a  small  boy,  all  the  way  from  New  York  to  Stamford,  hanging 
on  behind.  As  I  came  in  I  looked  again  at  the  train  —  the 
long  dull  train  that  had  been  pulled  along  by  the  Invisible,  by 
the  kingdom  of  the  air  and  the  sky  —  the  long,  dull,  heavy 
Train!     And  the  spirit  of  the  far-off  sun  was  in  it! 

In  Count  Zeppelin's  new  airship  the  new  social  spirit  has  a 
symbol,  and  in  the  gyroscopic  train  the  inspired  millionaire  is 
on  a  firm  foundation.  The  power  of  the  new  kind  and  new  size 
of  capitalist  is  his  power  of  keeping  an  equihbrium  with  the 
people,  and  the  men  of  real  genius  in  modern  affairs  are  men 
who  have  motor  genius  and  light  genius  over  other  men's  wills. 
They  are  allied  to  the  X-ray  and  the  airship,  and  gain  their  pre- 
eminence by  their  power  of  forecast  and  invention  —  their 
power  of  riding  upon  the  unseen,  upon  the  thoughts  of  men  and 
the  spirit  of  the  time.  Even  the  painters  have  caught  this 
spirit.  The  plein  air  painters  are  painting  the  light,  and  the 
sculptors  are  carving  shadows  and  haloes,  and  we  have  not  an 
art  left  which  does  not  lean  out  into  the  Invisible.  And  religion 
is  full  of  this  spirit  and  theosophy  and  Christian  Science.  The 
playwrights  are  touched  by  it;  and  the  action,  instead  of  being 
all  on  the  stage,  is  thrown  out  into  the  spirit  of  the  audience. 
The  play  in  a  modern  theatre  is  not  oil  the  stage  but  in  the  stalls. 
Maeterlinck,  Ibsen,  ShaW,  merely  use  the  stage  as  a  kind  of 
magic-lantern  or  suggestion-centre  for  the  real  things  that,  out 
behind  us  in  the  dark,  are  happening  in  the  audience. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  CROWD'S  IMAGINATION  ABOUT  THE  FUTURE 

I  REMEMBER  looking  over  with  H.  Q.  Wells  one  night  some 
time  ago  a  set  of  pictures  or  photographs  of  the  future  in  Amer- 
ica, which  he  had  brought  home  with  him.  They  were  largely 
skyscrapers,  big  bridges,  Niagaras,  and  things;  and  I  could  not 
help  thinking,  as  I  came  home  that  night,  how  much  more  Mr. 
Wells  had  of  the  future  of  America  in  his  own  mind  than  he 
could  possibly  buy  in  his  photographs.  What  funny  little 
films  they  were  after  all,  how  faint  and  pathetic,  how  almost 
tragically  dull,  those  pictures  of  the  future  of  my  country  were ! 
H.  G.  Wells  himself,  standing  in  his  own  doorway,  was  more 
like  America,  and  more  like  the  future  of  America,  than  the 
pictures  were. 

The  future  in  America  cannot  be  pictured.  The  only  place 
it  can  be  seen  is  in  people's  faces.  Go  out  into  the  street,  in 
New  York,  in  Chicago,  in  San  Francisco,  in  Seattle;  look 
eagerly  as  you  go  into  the  faces  of  the  men  who  pass,  and 
you  feel  hundreds  of  years  —  the  next  hundred  years  —  like  a 
breath,  swept  past.  America,  with  all  its  forty-story  buildings, 
its  little  Play  Niagaras,  its  great  dumb  Rockies,  is  the  unseen 
country.  It  can  only  as  yet  be  seen  in  people's  eyes.  Some 
days,  flowing  sublime  and  silent  through  our  noisy  streets,  and 
through  the  vast  panorama  of  our  towers,  I  have  heard  the  foot- 
falls of  the  unborn,  like  sunshine  around  me. 

This  feeling  America  gives  one  in  the  streets  is  the  real 
America.  The  solidity,  the  finality,  the  substantial  fact  in 
America,  is  the  daily  sense  in  the  street?  of  the  future.  And  it 
has  seemed  to  me  that  this  fact  —  whether  one  observes  it  in 

69 


70  CROWDS 

Americans  in  America,  in  Americans  in  England  and  in  other 
nations  —  is  what  one  might  call,  for  lack  of  a  better  name,  the 
American  temperament  in  all  peoples  is  the  most  outstanding 
typical  and  important  fact  with  which  our  modern  world  and 
our  philosophy  about  the  world  have  now  to  reckon.  Nothing 
can  be  seen  as  it  really  is  if  this  amazing  pervasive  hourly  sense 
of  the  future  is  left  out  of  it. 

All  power  is  rapidly  coming  to  be  based  on  news — news  about 
human  nature,  and  about  what  is  soon  to  be  done  by  people. 
This  news  travels  by  express  in  boxes,  by  newspapers,  by  tele- 
phone, by  word  of  mouth,  and  by  wireless  telegraph.  Most  of 
the  wireless  news  is  not  only  wireless,  but  it  is  in  cipher  —  hence 
prophets,  or  men  who  have  great  sensitiveness;  men  whose 
souls  and  bodies  are  films  for  the  future,  platinum  plates  for 
the  lights  and  shadows  of  events;  men  who  are  world-poets, 
sensitive  to  the  air-waves  and  the  light-waves  of  truth,  to  the 
faintest  vibrations  from  To-morrow,  or  from  the  next  hundred 
years  hovering  just  ahead.  As  a  matter  of  course,  it  is  already 
coming  to  be  true  that  the  most  practical  man  to-day  is  the 
prophet.  In  the  older  days,  men  used  to  look  back  for  wisdom, 
and  the  practical  man  was  the  man  who  spoke  from  experience, 
and  they  crucified  the  prophet.  But  to-day,  the  practical  man 
is  the  man  who  can  make  the  best  guess  on  to-morrow.  The 
cross  has  gone  by;  at  least,  the  cross  is  being  pushed  farther 
along.  A  prophet  in  business  or  politics  gets  a  large  salary  now; 
he  is  a  recognized  force.  Being  a  prophet  is  getting  to  be  al- 
most smug  and  respectable. 

We  live  so  in  the  future  in  our  modern  life,  and  our  rewards 
are  so  great  for  men  who  can  live  in  the  future,  that  a  man  who 
can  be  a  ten-year  prophet,  or  a  twenty -five-year  prophet,  like 
James  J.  Hill,  is  put  on  a  pedestal,  or  rather  is  not  wasted  on  a 
pedestal,  and  is  made  President  of  a  railroad.  He  swings  the 
country  as  if  it  were  his  hat.  We  see  great  cities  tagging  Wilbur 
Wright,  and  emperors  clinging  to  the  skirts  of  Count  Zeppelin, 
We  only  crucify  a  prophet  now  if  he  is  a  hundred,  or  two  hun- 


CROWD  IMAGINATION  ABOUT  THE  FUTURE  71 

Jred  or  five  hundred  years  ahead.  Even  then,  we  would  not  be 
apt  to  crucify;  we  would  merely  not  use  him  much,  except  the 
first  twenty -fire  years  of  him. 

The  theory  is  no  longer  tenable  that  prophets  must  be  neces- 
sarily crucified.  As  a  matter  of  history,  most  prophets  have  been 
crucified  by  people;  but  it  was  not  so  much  because  of  their 
prophecy  as  because  their  prophecy  did  not  have  any  first 
twenty -five  years  in  it.  They  were  crucified  because  of  a  blank 
place  or  hiatus,  not  necessarily  in  their  own  minds,  but  at  least 
in  other  people's.  People  would  have  been  very  glad  to  have 
their  first  twenty-five  years'  worth  if  they  could  have  got  it.  It 
is  this  first  twenty-five  years,  or  joining-on  part,  which  is  most 
important  in  prophecy,  and  which  has  become  our  specialty  in 
the  Western  World.  One  might  say,  in  a  general  way,  that  the 
idea  of  having  a  first  twenty-five  years'  section  in  truth  for  a 
prophet  is  a  modern,  an  almost  American,  invention.  We  are 
temperamentally  a  country  of  the  future,  and  think  instinc- 
tively in  futures;  and  perhaps  it  is  not  too  much  to  say  (con- 
sidering all  the  faults  that  go  with  it  for  which  we  are  criticized) 
that  we  have  led  the  way  in  futures  as  a  specialty,  as  a  national 
habit  of  mind;  and  though  with  terrific  blunders  perhaps  have 
been  really  the  first  people  e7i  masse  to  put  being  a  prophet  on  a 
practical  basis  —  that  is,  to  supply  the  first  twenty-five  years' 
section,  or  the  next-thing-to-do  section  to  Truth,  to  put  in  a 
kind  of  coupling  between  this  world  and  the  next.  This  is 
what  America  is  for,  perhaps  —  to  put  in  the  coupling  between 
this  world  and  the  next. 

In  the  former  days,  the  strength  of  a  man,  or  of  an  estate,  or  a 
business,  was  its  stability.  In  the  new  world,  instead  of  sta- 
bility, we  have  the  idea  of  persistence,  and  power  lies  not  so 
much  in  solid  brittle  foundation  quality  as  in  conductivity. 
Socially,  men  can  be  divided  into  conductors  —  men  who  con- 
nect powers  —  and  non-conductors  —  men  who  do  not;  and 
power  lies  in  persistence,  in  dogged  flexibility,  adaptableness, 
and  impressionableness.     The  set  conservative  class  of  people, 


72  CROWDS 

in  three  hundred  years,  are  going  to  be  the  dreamers,  inventors 
—  those  who  demonstrate  their  capacity  to  dream  true,  and  who 
hit  shrewdly  upon  probabihties  and  trends  and  futures;  and  the 
power  of  a  man  is  coming  to  be  the  power  of  observing  atmos- 
pheres, of  being  sensitive  to  the  intangible  and  the  unknown. 
People  are  more  likely  to  be  crucified  two  thousand  years  from 
now  for  wanting  to  stay  as  they  are.  There  used  to  be  the 
inertia  of  rest;  and  now  in  its  place,  working  reciprocally  in  a 
new  astonishing  equilibrium,  we  step  up  calmly  on  our  vast 
moving  sidewalk  of  civilization  and  swing  into  the  inertia  of 
motion. 

The  inertia  of  men,  instead  of  being  that  of  foundations, 
conventions,  customs,  facts,  sogginess,  and  heaviness,  is  getting 
to  be  an  inertia  now  toward  the  future,  or  the  next-thing-to-do. 
Most  of  us  can  prove  this  by  simply  looking  inward  and  taking 
a  glimpse  of  our  own  consciousness.  Let  a  man  draw  up  before 
his  own  mind  the  contents  of  his  own  consciousness  (if  he  has  a 
motor  consciousness),  and  we  find  that  the  future  in  his  life 
looms  up,  both  in  its  motives  and  its  character,  and  takes  about 
three  quarters  of  the  room  of  his  consciousness;  and  when  it 
is  not  looming  up,  it  is  woven  into  everything  he  does.  Even  if 
all  the  future  were  for  was  to  help  one  understand  the  present 
and  act  this  immediate  moment  as  one  should,  nine  tenths  of 
the  power  of  seeing  a  thing  as  it  is,  turns  out  to  be  one's  power 
of  seeing  it  as  it  is  going  to  be.  In  any  normal  man's  life,  it  is 
really  the  future  and  his  sense  of  the  future  that  make  his 
present  what  it  is. 

History  is  losing  its  monopoly^  It  is  only  absorbed  in  men's 
minds  —  in  the  minds  of  those  who  are  making  more  of  it  — 
in  parts  or  rather  in  elements  of  all  its  parts. 

The  trouble  with  history  seems  to  have  been,  thus  far,  that 
people  have  been  under  the  illusion  that  history  should  be  taken 
as  a  solid.  They  seem  to  think  it  should  be  taken  in  bulk. 
They  take  it,  some  of  them,  a  solid  hundred  years  of  it  or  so, 
and  gulp  it  down.     The  advantage  of  prophecy  is  that  it  can- 


CROWD  IMAGINATION  ABOUT  THE  FUTURE  73 

not  be  taken  as  a  solid  by  people  who  would  take  everything  so 
if  they  could.  Prophecy  is  protected.  People  have  to  breathe 
it,  assimilate  it,  and  get  it  into  their  circulation  and  make  a 
solid  out  of  it  personally,  and  do  it  all  themselves.  It  is  this 
process  which  is  making  our  modern  men  spiritual,  interpre- 
tative, and  powerful  toward  the  present  and  toward  the  past, 
and  which  is  giving  a  body  and  soul  to  knowledge,  and  is  making 
knowledge  lively  and  human,  the  kind  of  knowledge  (when 
men  get  it)  that  makes  things  happen. 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  CROWD'S  IMAGINATION  ABOUT  PEOPLE 

I  WOULD  like  to  propose,  as  a  basis  for  the  judgment  of 
men  and  events,  and  as  a  basis  for  forecasting  the  next  men  and 
next  events,  and  arriving  at  a  vision  of  action,  a  Theory  of 
the  World. 

Every  man  has  one. 

Every  man  one  knows  can  be  seen  doing  his  work  in  this 
world  on  a  great  background,  a  kind  of  panorama  or  stage 
setting  in  his  mind,  made  up  of  history  and  books,  newspapers, 
people,  and  experiences,  which  might  be  called  his  Theory  of 
the  World. 

It  is  his  theory  of  the  world  which  makes  him  what  he  is  — 
his  personal  judgment  or  personal  interpretation  of  what  the 
world  is  like,  and  what  works  in  it,  and  what  does  not  work. 

A  man's  theory  as  to  why  people  do  or  do  not  do  wrong  is  not 
a  theory  he  might  in  some  brief  disinterested  moment,  possibly 
at  luncheon,  take  time  to  discuss.  His  theory  of  what  is  wrong 
and  of  what  is  right,  and  of  how  they  work,  touches  the  eflBciency 
with  which  he  works  intimately  and  permanently  at  every  point 
every  minute  of  his  business  day. 

If  he  does  not  know,  in  the  middle  of  his  business  day,  what 
his  theory  of  the  world  —  of  human  nature  —  is,  let  him  stop 
and  find  out. 

A  man's  theory  of  the  world  is  the  skylight  or  manhole  over 
his  work.  It  becomes  his  hell  or  heaven  —  his  day  and  night. 
He  breathes  his  theory  of  the  world  and  breathes  his  idea  of  the 
people  in  it;  and  everything  he  does  may  be  made  or  may  be 
marred  by  what,  for  instance,  he  thinks  in  the  long-run  about 

74 


CROWD'S  IMAGINATION  ABOUT  PEOPLE       75 

what  I  am  saying  now  on  this  next  page.  Whether  he  is  writing 
for  people,  or  doing  business  with  them  over  a  counter,  or 
launching  books  at  them,  everything  he  does  will  be  steeped  in 
what  he  believes  about  what  I  am  saying  now  —  it  shall  be  the 
colour  of  the  world  to  him,  the  sound  or  timbre  of  his  voice 
—  what  he  thinks  or  can  make  up  his  mind  to  think,  of  what 
I  am  saying  —  on  this  next  page. 


CHAPTER  X 
A  DEMOCRATIC  THEORY  OF  HUMAN  NATURE 

IF  THE  men  who  were  crucifying  Jesus  could  have  been 
suddenly  stopped  at  the  last  moment,  and  if  they  could  have 
been  kept  perfectly  still  for  ten  minutes  and  could  have  thought 
about  it,  some  of  them  would  have  refused  to  go  on  with  the. 
crucifixion  when  the  ten  minutes  were  over.  If  they  could  have 
been  stopped  for  twenty  minutes,  there  would  have  been  still 
more  of  them  who  would  have  refused  to  have  gone  on  with  it. 
They  would  have  stolen  away  and  wondered  about  The  Man 
in  their  hearts.  There  were  others  who  were  there  who  would 
have  needed  twenty  days  of  being  still  and  of  thinking.  There 
were  some  who  would  have  had  to  have  twenty  years  to  see 
what  they  really  wanted,  in  all  the  circumstances,  to  do. 

People  crucified  Christ  because  they  were  in  a  hurry. 

They  did  what  they  wanted  to  do  at  the  moment.  So  far 
as  we  know,  there  were  only  two  men  who  did  what  they  would 
have  wished  they  had  done  in  twenty  years:  there  was  the  thief 
on  the  other  cross,  who  showed  The  Man  he  knew  who  He  was; 
and  there  was  the  disciple  John,  who  kept  as  close  as  he  could. 
John  perhaps  was  thinking  of  the  past  —  of  all  the  things  that 
Christ  had  said  to  him;  and  the  man  on  the  other  cross  was 
thinking  what  was  going  to  happen  next.  The  other  people 
who  had  to  do  with  the  crucifixion  were  all  thinking  about  the 
thing  they  were  doing  at  the  moment  and  the  way  they  felt 
about  it.  But  the  Man  was  Thinking,  not  of  His  suffering,  but 
of  the  men  in  front  of  Him,  and  of  what  they  could  be  thinking 
about,  and  what  they  would  be  thinking  about  afterward  — 
in  ten  minute:^  in  twenty  minutes,  in  twenty  days,  or  in  twenty 

76 


DEMOCRATIC  THEORY.OF  HUMAN  NATURE   77 

years;  and  suddenly  His  heart  was  flooded  with  pity  at  what 
they  would  be  thinking  about  afterward,  and  in  the  midst  of 
the  pain  in  His  arms  and  the  pain  in  His  feet  He  made  that 
great  cry  to  Heaven:  "Father,  forgive  them;  they  know  not 
what  they  do!" 

It  is  because  Christians  have  never  quite  believed  that  The 
Man  really  meant  this  when  He  said  it  that  they  have  persecuted 
the  Jews  for  two  thousand  years.  It  is  because  they  do  not 
believe  it  now  that  they  blame  Mr.  Rockefeller  for  doing  what 
most  of  them  twenty  years  ago  would  have  done  themselves. 
It  was  one  of  the  hardest  things  to  do  and  say  that  any  one  ever 
said  in  the  world,  and  it  was  said  at  the  hardest  possible  time 
to  say  it.  It  was  strange  that  one  almost  swooning  with  pain 
should  have  said  the  gentlest-hearted  and  truest  thing 
about  human  nature  that  has  ever  been  said  since  the 
world  began.  It  has  seemed  to  me  the  most  Hteral,  and 
perhaps  the  most  practical,  truth  that  has  been  said  since  the 
world  began. 

It  goes  straight  to  the  point  about  people.  It  gives  one  one's 
definition  of  goodness  both  for  one's  self  and  for  others.  It  gives 
one  a  program  for  action. 

Except  in  our  more  joyous  and  free  moments,  we  assume  that 
when  people  do  us  a  wrong,  they  know  what  they  are  about. 
They  look  at  the  right  thing  to  do  and  they  look  at  the  wrong 
one,  and  they  choose  the  wrong  one  because  they  like  it  better. 
Nine  people  out  of  ten  one  meets  in  the  streets  coming  out  of 
church  on  Sunday  morning,  if  one  asked  them  the  question 
plainly,  "Do  you  ever  do  wrong  when  you  know  it  is  wrong?" 
would  say  that  they  did.  If  you  ask  them  what  a  sin  is,  they 
will  tell  you  that  it  is  something  you  do  when  you  know  you 
ought  not  to  do  it. 

But  The  Man  Himself,  in  speaking  of  the  most  colossal  sin 
that  has  ever  been  committed,  seemed  to  think  that  when  men 
committed  a  sin,  it  was  because  they  did  not  really  see  what  it 
was  that  they  were  doing.     They  did  what  they  wanted  to  do 


78  CROWDS 

at  the  moment.  They  did  not  do  what  they  would  have  wished 
they  had  done  in  twenty  years. 

I  would  define  goodness  as  doing  what  one  would  wish  one  had 
done  in  twenty  years  —  twenty  years,  twenty  days,  twenty 
minutes,  or  twenty  seconds,  according  to  the  time  the  action 
takes  to  get  ripe. 

It  would  be  far  more  true  and  more  to  the  point  instead  of 
scolding  or  admiring  Mr.  Rockefeller's  skilled  labour  at  getting 
too  rich,  to  point  out  mildly  that  he  has  done  something  that 
in  the  long-run  he  would  not  have  wanted  to  do;  that  he  has 
lacked  the  social  imagination  for  a  great  permanently  successful 
business.  His  sin  has  consisted  in  his  not  taking  pains  to  act 
accurately  and  permanently,  in  his  not  concentrating  his  mind 
and  finding  out  what  he  really  wanted  to  do.  It  would  seem 
to  be  better  and  truer  and  more  accurate  in  the  tremendous 
crisis  of  our  modern  life  to  judge  Mr.  Rockefeller,  not  as 
monster  of  wickedness,  but  merely  as  an  inefiicient,  morally 
underwitted  man.  There  are  things  that  he  has  not  thought 
of  that  every  one  else  has. 

We  see  that  in  all  those  qualities  that  really  go  to  make  a 
great  business  house  in  a  great  nation  John  D.  Rockefeller 
stands  as  the  most  colossal  failure  as  yet  that  our  American 
business  life  has  produced.  To  point  his  incompetence  out 
quietly  and  calmly  and  without  scolding  would  seem  to  be  the 
only  fair  way  to  deal  with  Mr.  Rockefeller.  He  merely  has 
not  done  what  he  would  have  wished  he  had  done  in  twenty, 
well,  possibly  two  hundred  years,  or  as  long  a  time  as  it  would 
be  necessary  to  allow  for  Mr.  Rockefeller  to  see.  The  one 
thing  that  the  world  could  accept  gracefully  from  Mr.  Rocke- 
feller now  would  be  the  establishment  of  a  great  endowment 
of  research  and  education  to  help  other  people  to  see  in  time 
how  they  can  keep  from  being  like  him.  If  Mr.  Rockefeller 
leads  in  this  great  work  and  sees  it  soon  enough,  perhaps  he 
will  stop  suddenly  being  the  world's  most  lonely  man. 

Many  men  have  been  lonely  before  in  the  presence  of  a  few 


DEMOCRATIC  THEORY  OF  HUMAN  NATURE  79 

fellow  human  beings;  but  to  be  lonely  with  a  whole  nation  — 
eighty  million  people;  to  feel  a  whole  human  race  standing  there 
outside  of  your  life  and  softly  wondering  about  you,  staring  at 
you  in  the  showcase  of  your  money,  peering  in  as  out  of  a  thou- 
sand newspapers  iipon  you  as  a  kind  of  moral  curiosity  under 
glass,  studying  you  as  the  man  who  has  performed  the  most 
athletic  feat  of  not  seeing  what  he  was  really  doing  and  how  he 
really  looked  in  all  the  world  —  this  has  been  Mr.  Rockefeller's 
experience.  He  has  not  done  what  he  would  wish  he  had  done 
in  twenty  years. 

Goodness  may  be  defined  as  getting  one's  own  attention,  as 
boning  down  to  find  the  best  and  most  efficient  way  of  finding 
out  what  one  wants  to  do.  Any  man  who  will  make  adequate 
arrangements  with  himself  at  suitable  times  for  getting  his  own 
attention  will  be  good.  Any  one  else  from  outside  who  can 
make  such  arrangements  for  him,  such  arrangements  of  expres- 
sion or  —  of  advertising  goodness  as  to  get  his  attention,  will 
make  him  good. 


CHAPTER  XI 

DOING  AS  ONE  WOULD  WISH  ONE  HAD  DONE 
IN  TWENTY  YEARS 

IF  TWO  great  shops  could  stand  side  by  side  on  the  Main 
Street  of  the  World,  and  all  the  vices  could  be  put  in  the  show 
window  of  one  of  them  and  all  the  virtues  in  the  show  windows 
the  other,  and  all  the  people  could  go  by  all  day,  all  night,  and 
see  the  windowful  of  virtues  as  they  were,  and  the  windowful 
of  vices  as  they  were,  all  the  world  would  be  good  in  the 
morning. 

It  would  stay  good  as  long  as  people  remembered  how  the 
windows  looked.  Or  if  they  could  not  remember,  all  they  would 
need  to  do,  most  people,  when  a  vice  tempted  them  would  be 
to  step  out,  look  at  it  in  its  window  a  minute  —  possibly  take 
a  look  too  at  the  other  window  —  and  they  would  be  good. 

If  a  man  were  to  take  a  fancy  to  any  particular  vice,  and 
would  take  a  step  up  to  The  Window,  and  take  one  firm  look 
at  it  in  The  Window  —  see  it  lying  there,  its  twenty  years'  evil 
its  twenty  days',  its  twenty  minutes'  evil,  all  branching  up  out 
of  it  —  he  would  be  good. 

When  we  see  the  wrong  on  one  side  and  the  right  on  the  other 
and  really  see  the  right  as  vividly  as  we  do  the  wrong,  we  do 
right  automatically.  Wild  horses  cannot  drag  a  man  away 
from  doing  right  if  he  sees  what  the  right  is. 

A  little  while  ago  in  a  New  England  city  where  the  grade 
crossings  had  just  been  abolished,  and  where  the  railroad  wound 
its  way  on  a  huge  yellow  sandbank  through  the  most  beautiful 
part  of  the  town,  a  prominent,  public-spirited  citizen  wrote  a 
letter  to  the  President  of  the  Company  suggesting  that  the 

80 


DOING  AS  ONE  WOULD  WISH  81 

railroad  (for  a  comparatively  small  sum,  which  he  mentioned) 
plant  its  sandbanks  with  trees  and  shrubs.  A  letter  came  the 
next  day  saying  that  the  railroad  was  unwilling  to  do  it.  He 
might  quite  justifiably  have  been  indignant  and  flung  himself 
into  print  and  made  a  little  scene  in  the  papers,  which  would 
have  been  the  regular  and  conventional  thing  to  do  under  the 
circumstances.  But  it  occurred  to  him  instead,  being  a  man  of 
a  curious  and  practical  mind,  that  possibly  he  did  not  know  how 
to  express  himself  to  railroad  presidents,  and  that  his  letter  had 
not  said  what  he  meant.  He  thought  he  would  try  again,  and 
see  what  would  happen  if  he  expressed  himself  more  fully  and 
adequately.  He  took  for  it  this  second  time  a  box  seven  feet 
long.  The  box  contained  two  long  rolls  of  paper,  one  a  picture 
by  a  landscape  gardener  of  the  embankment  as  it  would  look 
when  planted  with  trees  and  with  shrubs,  and  the  other  a  photo- 
graph —  a  long  panorama  of  the  same  embankment  as  it  then 
stood  with  its  two  great  broadsides  of  yellowness  trailing  through 
the  city.  The  box  containing  the  rolls  was  sent  without  com- 
ment and  with  photographs  and  estimates  of  cost  on  the  bottom 
of  the  pictures. 

A  letter  from  the  railroad  came  next  day  thanking  him  for 
his  suggestion,  and  promising  to  have  the  embankment  made 
into  a  park  at  once. 

If  God  had  arranged  from  the  beginning,  slides  of  the  virtues, 
and  had  furnished  every  man  with  a  stereopticon  inside,  and  if 
all  a  man  had  to  do  at  any  particular  time  of  temptation  was  to 
take  out  just  the  right  slide  or  possibly  try  three  or  four  up 
there  on  his  canvas  a  second,  no  one  would  ever  have  any  trouble 
in  doing  right. 


It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  this  way  of  looking  at  evil  and 
good  —  at  the  latent  capacities  of  evil  and  good  in  men,  if  a 
man  once  beUeves  it,  and  if  a  man  once  practises  it  as  a  part 
of  his  daily  practical  interpretation  and  mastery  of  men,  will 


82  CROWDS 

soon  put  a  new  face  for  him  on  nearly  every  great  human 
problem  with  which  he  finds  his  time  confronted.  We  shall 
watch  the  men  in  the  world  about  us — each  for  their  little  day — 
trying  their  funny,  pathetic,  curious  little  moral  experiments, 
and  we  shall  see  the  men  —  all  of  the  men  and  all  of  the  good 
and  the  evil  in  the  men  this  moment  —  daily  before  our  eyes 
working  out  with  an  implacable  hopefulness  the  fate  of  the 
world.  We  know  that,  in  spite  of  self-deceived  syndicalism  and 
self-deceived  trusts,  in  spite  of  coal  strikes  and  all  the  vain, 
comic  little  troops  of  warships  around  the  earth,  peace  and 
righteousness  in  a  vast  overtone  are  singing  toward  us. 

We  are  not  only  going  to  have  new  and  better  motives  in  our 
modern  men,  but  the  new  and  better  motives  are  going  to  be 
thrust  upon  us.  Every  man  who  reads  these  pages  is  having, 
at  the  present  moment,  motives  in  his  life  which  he  would  not 
have  been  capable  of  at  first.  Why  should  not  a  human  race 
have  motives  which  it  was  not  capable  of  at  first?  If  one  takes 
up  two  or  three  motives  of  one's  own  —  the  small  motives  and 
the  large  ones  —  and  holds  them  up  in  one's  hand  and  looks  at 
them  quietly  from  the  point  of  view  of  what  one  would  wish  one 
had  done  in  twenty  years,  there  is  scarcely  one  of  us  who  would 
choose  the  small  ones.  People  who  are  really  modern,  that  is, 
who  look  beyond  themselves  in  what  they  do  to  others,  who  live 
their  lives  as  oiie  might  say  six  people  away,  or  sixty  people 
farther  out  from  themselves,  or  sixty  million  people  farther,  are 
becoming  more  common  everywhere;  and  people  who  look 
beyond  the  moment  in  what  they  do  to  another  day,  who  are 
getting  more  and  more  to  live  their  lives  twenty  years  ahead, 
and  to  have  motives  that  will  last  twenty  years,  are  driven  to 
better  and  more  permanent  motives. 

Thinking  of  more  people  when  we  act  for  ourselves  means 
ethical  consciousness  or  goodness,  and  better  and  more  per- 
manent motives. 

In  the  last  analysis,  the  men  who  permanently  succeed  in 
business  will  have  to  see  farther  than  the  other  people  do. 


DOING  AS  ONE  WOULD  WISH  83 

Men  like  John  D.  Rockefeller,  who  have  made  failures  of 
their  lives,  and  have  not  been  able  to  conduct  a  business  so  as 
to  keep  it  out  of  the  courts,  have  failed  because  they  have  had 
imagination  about  Things  but  not  imagination  about  people. 

The  man  who  is  just  at  hand  will  not  do  over  again  what 
Mr.  Rockefeller  has  done.  He  will  at  least  have  made  some 
advance  in  imagination  over  Rockefeller. 

Mr.  Rockefeller  became  rich  by  cooperating  with  other  rich 
men  to  exploit  the  public.  The  man  of  the  immediate  future 
is  going  to  get  rich,  as  rich  as  he  cares  to  be,  by  cooperating 
not  merely  with  his  competitors  —  which  is  as  far  as  Rockefeller 
got  —  but  by  cooperating  with  the  people. 

It  is  a  mere  matter  of  social  imagination,  of  seeing  what 
succeeds  most  permanently,  and  honourably,  of  putting  what 
has  been  called  "goodness"  and  what  is  going  to  be  called 
"Business"  together.  In  other  words,  social  imagination  is 
going  go  make  a  man  gravitate  toward  mutual  interest  or  co- 
operation, which  is  the  new  and  inevitable  level  of  eflficiency 
and  success  in  business.  Success  is  being  transferred  from 
men  of  millionaire  genius  to  men  of  social  and  human  genius. 
The  men  who  are  going  to  compete  most  successfully  in  mod- 
ern competitive  business  are  competing  by  knowing  how  to 
cooperate  better  than  their  competitors  do.  Employers,  em- 
ployees, consumers,  partners,  become  irresistible  by  coopera- 
tion; only  employers,  employees,  consumers,  and  partners 
who  cooperate  better  than  they  do  can  hope  to  compete  with 
them.  The  Trusts  have  already  crowded  out  many  small 
rivals  because,  while  their  cooperation  has  been  one-sided, 
they  have  cooperated  with  more  people  than  their  rivals  could ; 
and  the  good  Trusts,  in  the  same  way  are  going  to  crowd  out  the 
bad  Trusts,  because  the  good  ones  will  know  how  to  cooperate 
with  more  people  than  the  bad  ones  do.  They  will  have  the 
human  genius  to  see  how  they  can  cooperate  with  the  people 
instead  of  against  them. 

They  are  going  to  invent  ways  of  winning  and  keeping  the 


84  CROWDS 

confidence  of  the  people,  of  taking  to  this  end  a  smaller  and  more 
just  share  of  profits.  And  they  are  going  to  gain  their  leader- 
ship through  the  wisdom  and  power  that  goes  with  their  money, 
and  not  through  the  money  itself.  It  is  the  spiritual  power  of 
their  money  that  is  going  to  count;  and  wealth,  instead  of  being 
a  millionaire  disease,  is  going  to  become  a  great  social  energj'' 
in  democracy.  We  are  going  to  let  men  be  rich  because  they 
represent  us,  not  because  they  hold  us  up,  and  because  the 
hold-up  has  gone  by,  that  is :  getting  all  one  can,  and  service  — 
getting  what  we  have  earned  —  has  come  in. 

The  new  kind  and  new  size  of  politician  will  win  his  power 
by  his  faith,  like  U.  Ren  of  Oregon;  the  new  kind  and  new  size 
of  editor  is  going  to  hire  with  brains  a  millionaire  to  help  him 
run  his  paper;  and  the  new  kind  and  new  size  of  author,  instead 
of  tagging  a  publisher,  will  be  paid  royalties  for  supplying  him 
with  new  ideas  and  creating  for  him  new  publics.  Power  in 
modern  life  is  to  be  light  and  heat  and  motion,  and  not  a  gift 
of  being  heavy  and  solid.     Even  Money  shall  lose  its  inertia. 

We  are  in  this  way  being  driven  into  having  new  kinds  and 
new  sizes  of  men;  and  some  of  them  will  be  rich  ones,  and  some 
of  them  will  be  poor,  and  no  one  will  care.  We  will  simply  look 
at  the  man  and  at  what  size  he  is. 

If  our  preachers  are  not  saving  us,  our  business  men  will. 
Sometimes  one  suspects  that  the  reason  goodness  is  not  more 
popular  in  modern  life  is  that  it  has  been  taken  hold  of  the 
wrong  way.  Perhaps  when  we  stop  teasing  people,  and  take 
goodness  seriously  and  calmly,  and  see  that  goodness  is  essen- 
tially imagination,  that  it  is  brains,  that  it  is  thinking  down 
through  to  what  one  really  wants,  goodness  will  begin  to  be 
more  coveted.  Except  among  people  with  almost  no  brains 
Dr  imagination  at  all,  it  will  be  popular. 

Perhaps  it  is  unnecessary  to  say  that  these  things  that  I 
have  been  saying,  or  trying  to  say,  about  the  flexibility  and 
the  potentiality  of  the  human  race  in  its  present  crisis,  in  its 
present  struggle  to  maintain  and  add  to  its  glory  on  the  earth. 


DOING  AS  ONE  WOULD  WISH  85 

are  all  beyond  the  range  of  possibility,  and  the  present  strength 
of  manhood.  But  I  can  only  hope  that  these  objections  that 
people  make  will  turn  out  like  mine.  I  have  been  making 
objections  all  my  life,  as  all  idealists  must  —  only  to  watch  with 
dismay  and  joy  the  old-time,  happy  obdurate  way  objections 
have  of  going  by. 

People  began  by  saying  they  would  never  use  automobiles 
because  they  were  so  noisy  and  ill-odoured  and  ugly.  Presto! 
The  automobile  becomes  silent  and  shapes  itself  in  lines  of 
beauty. 

Some  of  us  had  decided  against  balloons.  "Even  if  the 
balloon  succeeds,"  we  said,  "there  will  be  no  way  of  going  just 
where  and  when  you  want  to."  And  then,  presto!  regular 
channels  of  wind  are  discovered,  and  the  balloon  goes  on. 

"Aeroplanes,"  we  said,  "may  be  successful,  but  the  more 
successful  they  are,  the  more  dangerous,  and  the  more  danger 
there  will  be  of  collisions  —  collisions  in  the  dark  and  up  in 
great  sky  at  night."  And,  presto!  man  invents  the  wireless 
telegraph,  and  the  entire  sky  can  be  full  of  whispers  telling 
every  airship  where  all  the  other  airships  are. 

Some  of  us  have  decided  that  we  will  never  have  anything 
to  do  with  monopoly.  Presto!  there  is  suddenly  evolved  an 
entirely  new  type  of  monopolist  —  the  man  who  can  be  rich 
and  good;  the  millionaire  who  has  invented  a  monopoly  that 
serves  the  owners,  the  producers  and  employees,  the  distributors 
and  the  consumers  alike.  An  American  railway  President  has 
been  saying  lately  that  America  would  not  have  enough  to  eat 
in  2050,  but  it  would  not  do  to  try  to  prove  this  just  yet.  Some 
one,  almost  any  day,  will  invent  a  food  that  is  as  highly  con- 
entrated  as  dynamite,  and  the  whole  food  supply  of  New  York 
—  who  knows?  —  shall  be  carried  around  in  one  railway 
President's  vest  pocket. 


CHAPTER  XII 
NEW  KINDS  AND  NEW  SIZES  OF  MEN 

IT  WOULD  be  hard  to  overestimate  the  weariness  and  cyni- 
cism and  despair  that  have  been  caused  in  the  world  by  its 
more  recklessly  hopeful  men  —  the  men  who  plump  down  hap- 
pily anywhere  and  hope,  the  optimists  who  are  merely  slovenly 
in  their  minds  about  evil.  But  the  optimism  that  consists  in 
putting  evil  facts  up  into  a  kind  of  outdoors  in  our  minds  and  in 
giving  them  room  to  exercise  in  our  thoughts  and  feelings,  the 
optimism  that  consists  in  having  one's  brain  move  vigorously 
through  disagreeable  facts  —  organize  them  into  the  other 
facts  with  which  they  belong  and  with  which  they  work  —  is 
worthy  of  consideration.  Many  of  us,  who  have  tried 
optimism  and  pessimism  both,  have  noticed  certain  things. 

When  one  is  being  pessimistic,  one  almost  always  has  the 
feeling  of  being  rather  clever.  It  is  forced  upon  one  a  little, 
of  course,  having  all  those  other  people  about  one  stodgily 
standing  up  for  people  and  not  really  seeing  through  them ! 

So,  though  one  ought  not  to,  one  does  feel  a  little  superior  — 
even  with  the  best  intentions  —  when  one  is  being  discouraged. 

But  the  trouble  with  pessimism  is  that  it  is  only  at  the 
moment  when  one  is  having  it  that  one  really  enjoys  it,  or  feels 
in  this  way  about  it. 

Perhaps  I  should  not  undertake  to  speak  for  others,  and 
should  only  speak  for  myself;  but  I  can  only  bear  witness,  for 
one,  that  every  time  in  my  life  that  I  have  broken  through  the 
surface  a  little,  and  seen  through  to  the  evil,  and  found  myself 
suddenly  and  astutely  discouraged,  I  have  found  afterward  that 
all  I  had  to  do  was  to  ^ee  the  same  thing  a  little  farther  over, 


.NEW  KINDS  AND  NEW  SIZES  OF  MEN         87 

set  it  in  the  light  beyond  it,  and  look  at  it  in  larger  or  more  full 
relations,  and  I  was  no  longer  astutely  discouraged. 

So  I  have  come  to  believe  slowly  and  grimly  that  feeling 
discouraged  about  the  world  is  not  quite  clever.  I  have  noticed 
it,  too,  in  watching  other  people  —  men  I  know.  If  I  could 
take  all  the  men  I  know  who  are  living  and  acting  as  if  they 
believed  big  things  about  people  to-day,  men  who  are  daily 
taking  for  granted  great  things  in  human  nature,  and  put  them 
in  one  group  by  themselves  all  together,  and  if  I  could  then  take 
all  the  men  I  know  who  are  taking  little  things  for  granted  in  one 
another  and  in  human  nature,  I  do  not  believe  very  many  people 
would  find  it  hard  to  tell  which  group  would  be  more  clever. 
Possibly  the  reason  more  of  us  do  not  spend  more  time  in  being 
hopeful  about  the  world  is  that  it  takes  more  brains  usually  than 
we  happen  to  have  at  the  moment.  Hope  may  be  said  to  be 
an  act  of  the  brain  in  which  it  sees  facts  in  relations  large  enough 
to  see  what  they  are  for,  an  act  in  which  it  insists  in  a  given  case 
upon  giving  the  facts  room  enough  to  turn  around  and  to  relate 
themselves  to  one  another,  and  settle  down  where  they  belong 
in  one's  mind,  the  way  they  would  in  real  time. 

So  now,  at  last.  Gentle  Reader,  having  looked  back  and  having 
looked  forward,  I  know  the  way  I  am  going. 

I  am  going  to  hope. 

It  is  the  only  way  to  see  through  things.  The  only  way  to 
dare  to  see  through  ones'  self;  the  only  way  to  see  through  other 
people  and  to  see  past  them,  and  to  see  with  them  and  for  them 
—  is  to  hope. 

So  I  am  putting  the  challenge  to  the  reader,  in  this  book,  as 
I  have  put  it  to  myself. 

There  are  four  questions  with  which  day  by  day  we  stand 
face  to  face : 

1.  Does  human  nature  change? 

2.  Does  it  change  toward  a  larger  and  longer  vision? 

3.  Will  not  a  larger  and  longer  vision  mean  new  kinds  and 
new  sizes  of  men? 


88  CROWDS 

4.  Will  not  new  sizes  of  men  make  new-sized  ethics  practical 
and  make  a  new  world? 

Everything  depends  for  every  man  upon  this  planet,  at  this 
moment,  on  how  he  decides  these  questions.  If  he  says  Yes, 
he  will  live  one  kind  of  life,  he  will  live  up  to  his  world.  If  he 
says  No,  he  will  have  a  mean  world,  smaller-minded  than  he  is 
himself,  and  he  will  live  down  to  it. 

This  is  what  the  common  run  of  men  about  us  —  the  men  of 
less  creative  type  in  literature,  in  business,  and  in  politics  — 
are  doing.  They  do  not  believe  human  nature  is  changing. 
They  are  living  down  to  a  world  that  is  going  by.  They  are 
living  down  to  a  world  that  is  smaller  than  they  are  themselves. 
They  are  trying  to  make  others  do  it.  They  answer  the  question 
"Does  human  nature  change.'^"  by  "No!"  Wilbur  Wright, 
when  he  flew  around  over  the  heads  of  the  people  in  New  York 
a  few  years  ago,  a  black  speck  above  a  whole  city  with  its  heads 
up,  answered  "Yes!  " 

But  the  real  importance  of  the  flying  machine  has  not  stopped 
short  with  a  little  delicate,  graceful  thing  like  walking  on  the  air 
instead  of  the  ground. 

The  big  and  really  revolutionary  thing  about  Wilbur  Wright's 
flying  was  that  he  changed  the  minds  of  the  whole  human  race 
in  a  few  minutes  about  one  thing.  There  was  one  particular 
thing  that  for  forty  thousand  years  they  knew  they  could  not  do. 
And  now  they  knew  they  could. 

It  naturally  follows  —  and  it  lies  in  the  mind  of  every  man 
who  lives  —  that  there  must  be  other  particular  things.  And 
as  nine  men  out  of  ten  are  in  business,  most  of  these  particular 
things  are  going  to  be  done  in  business. 

The  Wilbur  Wright  spirit  is  catching. 

It  is  as  if  a  Lid  had  been  lifted  off  the  world. 

One  sees  everywhere  business  men  going  about  the  street 
expecting  new  things  of  themselves.  They  expect  things  of 
the  very  ground,  and  of  the  air,  and  of  one  another  they  h;  d 
not  dared  expect  before. 


NEW  KINDS  AND  NEW  SIZES  OF  MEN        89 

The  other  day  m  a  New  England  city  I  saw  a  man,  who  had 
been  the  president  of  an  Electric  Light  Company  for  twenty 
years,  who  had  invented  a  public  service  corporation  that 
worked.  Since  he  took  office  and  dictated  the  policy  of  the 
Company,  every  single  overture  for  more  expensive  equipment 
in  the  electric  lighting  of  the  city  has  come  from  the  Company, 
and  every  single  overture  for  reducing  the  rate  to  consumers 
has  come  from  the  company. 

The  consumption  of  electricity  in  the  city  is  the  largest  per 
capita  in  the  world,  and  the  rate  is  the  cheapest  in  the  country; 
and,  incidentally,  the  Company  so  trusts  the  people  that  they  let 
them  have  electricity  without  metres,  and  the  people  so  trust 
the  Company  that  they  save  its  electricity  as  they  would  their 
own. 

Even  the  man  without  a  conscience,  who  would  be  mean  if 
he  could,  is  brought  to  terms,  and  knows  that  if  he  refrains 
from  leaving  his  lights  burning  all  night  when  he  goes  to  bed 
he  is  not  merely  saving  the  Company's  electricity  but  his  own. 
He  knows  that  he  is  reducing  his  own  and  everybody's  price 
for  electricity,  and  not  merely  increasing  the  profits  of  the 
Company. 

It  makes  another  kind  of  man  slowly  out  of  thousands  of  men 
every  day,  every  night,  turning  on  and  turning  off  their  lights. 

The  Electric  Light  Company  has  come  to  have  a  daily,  an 
almost  hourly,  influence  on  the  way  men  do  business  and  go 
about  their  work  in  that  city  —  the  motives  and  assumptions 
with  which  they  bargain  with  one  another  —  that  might  be 
en\ded  by  twenty  churches. 

All  that  had  happened  was  that  a  man  with  a  powerful, 
quietly  wilful  personality  —  the  kind  that  went  on  crusades 
and  took  cities  in  other  ages  —  had  appeared  at  last,  and 
proposed  to  do  the  same  sort  of  thing  in  business.  He  proposed 
to  express  his  soul,  just  as  it  was,  in  business  the  way  other 
people  had  expressed  theirs  for  a  few  hundred  years  in  poetry 
or  more  easy  and  conventional  ways. 


90  CROWDS 

If  he  could  not  have  made  the  electric  light  business  say  the 
things  about  people  and  about  himself  that  he  hked  and  that 
he  believed,  he  would  have  had  to  make  some  other  business 
say  them. 

One  of  the  things  he  had  most  wanted  to  say  and  prove  in 
business  was  the  economic  value  of  being  human,  the  enormous 
business  saving  that  could  be  effected  by  being  believed  in. 

He  preferred  being  believed  in  himself,  in  business,  and  he 
knew  other  people  would  prefer  it;  and  he  was  sure  that  if,  as 
people  said,  "being  believed  in  did  not  pay, "  it  must  be  because 
ways  of  inventing  faith  in  people,  the  technique  of  trust,  had 
not  been  invented. 

He  found  himself  invited  to  take  charge  of  the  Electric  Light 
Company  at  a  time  when  it  was  insolvent  and  in  disgrace  with 
the  people,  and  he  took  the  Corporation  in  hand  on  the  specific 
understanding  that  he  should  be  allowed  to  put  his  soul  into  it, 
that  he  should  be  allowed  his  own  way  for  three  years  —  in 
believing  in  people,  and  in  inventing  ways  of  getting  believed 
in  as  much  as  he  liked. 

The  last  time  I  saw  him,  though  he  is  old  and  nearly  blind, 
and  while  as  he  talked  there  lay  a  darkness  on  his  eyes,  there 
was  a  great  light  in  his  face. 

He  had  besieged  a  city  with  the  shrewdness  of  his  faith,  and 
conquered  a  hundred  thousand  men  by  believing  in  them  more 
than  they  could. 

By  believing  in  them  shrewdly,  and  by  thinking  out  ways  of 
expressing  that  belief,  he  had  invented  a  Corporation  —  a 
Public  Service  Corporation  —  that  had  a  soul,  and  conse- 
quently worked. 


BOOK   TWO 
LETTING  THE  CROWDS  BE  GOOD 

TO   ABRAHAM   LINCOLN 

They  stay  not  in  their  hold 
These  stokers. 
Stooping  to  hell 
To  feed  a  ship. 
Below  the  ocean  floors. 
Before  their  awful  doors 
Bathed  in  flame, 
I  hear  their  human  lives 
Drip  —  drip. 

Through  the  lolling  aisles  of  comrades 

In  and  out  of  sleep. 

Troops  of  faces 

To  and  fro  of  happy  feet, 

They  haunt  my  eyes. 

Their  murky  faces  beckon  me 

From  the  spaces  of  the  coolness  of  the  sea 

Their  fitful  bodies  away  against  the  skies. 


CHAPTER  I 
SPEAKING  AS  ONE  OF  THE  CROWD 

IT  IS  a  little  awkward  to  say  what  I  am  going  to  say  now. 

Probably  it  will  be  still  more  awkward  afterward. 

But  I  find  as  I  go  up  and  down  the  world  and  look  in  the 
faces  of  the  crowds  in  it,  that  it  is  true,  and  I  can  only  tell 
it  as  it  is. 

/  want  to  he  good. 

And  I  do  not  want  to  go  up  on  a  mountain  to  do  it,  or  to  slink 
off  and  live  all  alone  on  an  island  in  the  sea. 

I  go  a  step  further. 

I  believe  that  the  crowds  want  to  be  good. 

But  I  cannot  prove  that  people  want  to  be  good  in  crowds, 
and  so  for  the  sake  of  the  argument,  and  to  make  the  case  as 
simple  as  possible,  I  am  going  to  give  up  speaking  for  crowds, 
and  speak  for  myself  as  one  member  of  the  crowd  and  for  Lim. 
Lim  and  I  (and  Lim  is  a  business  man  and  not  a  mere  author) 
have  had  long  talks  in  which  we  have  confided  to  each  other 
what  we  think  this  world,  in  spite  of  appearances,  is  really  like, 
and  we  have  come  to  a  kind  of  provisional  program  and  to  a 
definite  agreement  on  our  two  main  points. 

1.  We  want  to  be  good. 

2.  We  want  other  people  to  be  good,  partly  as  a  matter  of 
convenience  for  us,  partly  for  morally  aesthetic  reasons,  and 
partly  because  we  want  to  be  in  a  kind  of  world  where  what  is 
good  in  us  works. 

The  next  point  in  our  confession  follows  from  this.  It  is  an 
awkward  and  exposed  thing  to  say  out  loud  to  people  in  general, 
but 

98 


94  CROWDS 

3.  Lim  and  I  want  to  make  over  the  earth. 

4.  Sitting  down  grimly  by  ourselves,  all  alone,  and  believing 
in  a  world  hard,  with  our  eyes  shut,  does  not  interest  us.  It  is 
this  particular  planet  just  as  it  is  that  interests  us,  in  its  present 
hopeful,  squirming  state. 

It  does  not  seem  to  us  to  the  point  just  now  to  conceive  some 
brand  new,  clean,  slick  planet  up  in  space,  with  crowds  of  per- 
fect and  convenient  people  on  it,  and  then  expect  to  lay  it 
down  in  the  night  like  a  great,  soft,  beautiful  dew  or  ideal  on  this 
one.  We  want  to  take  this  heavy,  inconvenient,  cumbersome, 
real  planet  that  we  have,  and  see  what  can  be  done  with  it,  and 
by  the  people  on  it,  what  can  be  done  by  these  same  people, 
whose  signs  one  goes  by  down  the  street,  with  Smith  &  Smith, 
Gowns,  with  Clapp  &  Clapp,  Butchers,  with  W.  H.  Riley  &  Co., 
Plumbers  and  Gas  Fitters,  and  with  things  that  real  people  are 
really  doing. 

The  things  that  real  people  are  really  doing,  when  one  thinks 
of  it,  are  Soap,  Tooth-brushes,  Subsoil  Pipes,  Wall  Papers, 
Razors,  Mattresses,  Suspenders,  Tiles,  Shoes,  Pots,  and  Kettles. 
Of  course  the  first  thing  that  happened  to  us,  to  Lim  and  to 
me  (as  any  one  might  guess,  in  a  little  quiet  job  like  mak- 
ing over  the  earth),  was  that  we  found  we  had  to  begin  with 
ourselves. 

We  did. 

We  are  obliged  to  admit  that,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  we  began, 
owing  to  circumstances,  in  a  kind  of  rudimentary  way  with  the 
idea  of  getting  people  to  take  up  goodness  by  talking  about  it. 

But  we  are  reformed  preachers  now.  We  seldom  backslide 
into  talking  to  people  about  goodness. 

We  have  made  up  our  minds  to  lie  low  and  keep  still  and  show 
them  some. 

Of  course  one  ought  to  have  some  of  one's  own  to  show.  But 
the  trouble  always  is,  if  it  is  really  good,  one  is  sure  not  to  know 
it,  or  at  least  one  does  not  know  which  it  is.  The  best  we  can 
do  with  goodness,  some  of  us,  if  we  want  it  to  show  more  quickly 


SPEAKING  AS  ONE  OF  THE  CROWD  95 

or  to  hurry  people  along  in  goodness  more,  is  to  show  them  other 
people's. 

I  sometimes  think  that  if  everybody  in  the  world  could  know 
my  plumber  or  pay  a  bill  to  him,  the  world  would  soon  begin 
slowly  but  surely  to  be  a  very  different  place. 

My  plumber  is  a  genius. 


CHAPTER  II 

IS  IT  WRONG  FOR  GOOD  PEOPLE  TO  BE 
EFFICIENT? 

PERHAPS  it  will  seem  a  pity  to  spoil  a  book  —  one  that 
might  have  been  really  rather  interesting  —  by  putting  the 
word  "goodness"  down  flatly  in  this  way  in  the  middle  of  it. 

And  in  a  book  which  deals  with  crowds,  too,  and  with 
business. 

I  would  not  yield  first  place  to  any  one  in  being  tired  of  the 
word.  I  think,  for  one,  that  unless  there  is  something  we  can 
do  to  it,  and  something  we  can  do  to  it  now,  it  had  better  be 
dropped. 

But  I  have  sometimes  discovered  when  I  had  thought  I  was 
tired  of  a  word,  that  what  I  was  really  tired  of  was  somebody 
who  was  using  it. 

I  do  not  mind  it  when  my  plumber  uses  it.  I  have  heard 
him  use  it  (and  swearing  softly,  I  regret  to  say)  when  it  affected 
me  like  a  Hymn  Tune. 

And  there  is  Non,  too. 

I  first  made  Non's  acquaintance  as  our  train  pulled  out  of 
New  York,  and  we  found  ourselves  going  down  together  on 
Friday  afternoon  to  spend  Sunday  with  M in  North  Caro- 
lina. The  first  thing  he  said  was,  when  we  were  seated 
in  the  Pullman  comfortably  watching  that  big,  still  world 
under  glass  roll  by  outside,  that  he  had  broken  an  engagement 
with  his  wife  to  come.  She  was  giving  a  Tea,  he  said,  that  after- 
noon, and  he  had  faithfully  promised  to  be  there.  But  a  week- 
end in  North  Carolina  appealed  to  him,  and  afternoon  tea 
—  well,  he  explained  to  me,  crossing  his  legs  and  beaming  at  me 

96 


SHOULD  GOOD  PEOPLE  BE  EFFICIENT?        97 

all  over  as  if  he  were  a  whole  genial,  successful  afternoon  tea  all 
by  himself  —  afternoon  tea  did  not  appeal  to  him. 

He  thought  probably  he  was  a  Non-Gregarious  Person. 

As  he  was  the  gusto  of  our  little  party  and  fairly  reeked  with 
sociability,  and  was  in  a  kind  of  orgy  of  gregariousness  every 
minute  all  the  way  to  Wilmington  (even  when  he  was  asleep  we 
heard  from  him) ,  we  called  him  the  Non-Gregarious  Person,  and 
every  time  he  piled  on  one  more  story,  we  reminded  him  how 
non-gregarious  he  was.  We  called  him  Non-Gregarious  all  the 
way  after  that  —  Non  for  short. 

This  is  the  way  I  became  acquainted  with  Non.  It  has  been 
Non  ever  since. 


I  found  in  the  course  of  the  next  three  days  that  when  Non 
was  not  being  the  Hfe  of  the  party  or  the  party  did  not  need  any 
more  life  for  a  while,  and  we  had  gone  off  by  ourselves,  he  be- 
came, like  most  people  who  let  themselves  go,  a  very  serious 
person.  When  he  talked  about  his  business,  he  was  even  relig- 
ious. Not  that  he  had  any  particular  vocabulary  for  being 
religious,  but  there  was  something  about  him  when  he  spoke  of 
business  —  his  ovm  business  —  that  almost  startled  me  at  first. 
He  always  seemed  to  be  regarding  his  business  when  he  spoke 
of  it  as  being,  for  all  practical  purposes,  a  kind  of  little  religion 
by  itself. 

Now  Non  is  a  builder  or  contractor. 


For  many  years  now  the  best  way  to  make  a  pessimist  or  a 
confirmed  infidel  out  of  anybody  has  been  to  get  him  to  build  a 
house.  No  better  arrangement  for  not  believing  in  more 
people,  and  for  not  believing  in  more  kinds  of  people  at  once  and 
for  life,  has  ever  been  invented  probably  than  building  a  house. 
No  man  has  been  educated,  or  has  been  really  tested  in  this 
world,  until  he  has  built  a  house.     I  submit  this  proposition  to 


98  CROWDS 

anybody  who  has  tried  it,  or  to  any  one  who  is  going  to  try  it. 
There  is  not  a  single  kind  or  type  of  man  who  sooner  or  later 
will  not  build  himself,  and  nearly  everything  that  is  the  matter 
with  him,  into  your  house.  The  house  becomes  a  kind  of  minia- 
ture model  (such  as  they  have  in  expositions)  of  what  is  the 
matter  with  people.  You  enter  the  door,  you  walk  inside  and 
brood  over  them.  Everything  you  come  upon,  from  the  white 
cellar  floor  to  the  timbers  you  bump  your  head  on  in  the  roof, 
reminds  you  of  something  or  of  rows  of  people  and  of  what  is 
the  matter  with  them.  It  is  the  new  houses  that  are  haunted 
now.  Any  man  who  is  sensitive  to  houses  and  to  people  and 
who  would  sit  down  in  his  house  when  it  is  finished  and  look 
about  in  it  seriously,  and  think  of  all  the  people  that  have  been 
built,  in  solid  wood  and  stone,  into  it,  would  get  up  softly  and 
steal  out  of  it,  out  of  the  front  door  of  it,  and  never  enter  that 
house  again. 

This  is  what  Non  saw.  He  saw  how  people  felt  about  their 
houses,  and  how  they  hved  in  them  helplessly  and  angrily  year 
after  year,  and  felt  hateful  about  the  world. 

1  gradually  drew  out  of  him  the  way  he  felt  about  it.  I  found 
he  was  not  as  good  as  some  people  are  at  talking  about  himself, 
but  the  subject  was  interesting.  He  began  his  career  building 
houses  for  people,  as  nearly  every  one  does.  The  general  idea 
is  that  everybody  is  expected  to  exact  commissions  from  every- 
body else,  and  the  owner  is  expected  to  pay  each  man  his  own 
commission  and  then  pay  all  the  commissions  that  each  man  has 
charged  the  other  man.  Every  house  that  got  built  in  this  way 
seemed  to  be  a  kind  of  network  or  conspiracy  of  not  doing  as  you 
would  be  done  by.  Non  did  not  see  any  way  out  at  first,  just 
for  one  man.  He  merely  noticed  how  things  were  going,  and 
he  noticed  that  nearly  every  person  that  he  had  dealings  with, 
from  the  bottom  to  the  top  of  the  house,  seemed  to  make  him 
feel  that  he  either  was,  or  would  be,  or  ought  to  be,  a  grafter. 
He  could  not  so  much  as  look  at  a  house  he  had  built,  through 
the  trees  when  he  was  going  by,  without  wishing  he  could  be  a 


SHOULD  GOOD  PEOPLE  BE  EFFICIENT?        99 

better  man,  and  studying  on  how  it  could  be  managed.  His 
own  first  houses  made  him  see  things.  They  proved  to  be  the 
making  of  him,  and  if  similar  houses  have  not  made  similar 
men,  it  is  their  fault.  It  might  not  be  reassuring  to  the  men 
who  are  now  living  in  these  first  houses  to  dwell  too  much  on 
this  (and  I  might  say  he  did  not  build  them  alone),  but  it  seems 
to  be  necessary  to  bring  out  the  most  striking  thing  about  Non 
in  his  first  stage  as  a  business  man,  viz. :  He  hated  his  business. 
He  made  up  his  mind  he  either  would  make  the  business  the 
kind  of  business  he  liked  or  get  out  of  it.  I  did  not  gather  from 
the  way  he  talked  about  it  that  he  had  any  idea  of  being  an  up- 
lifter.  He  merely  had,  apparently,  an  obstinate,  doggedly 
comfortable  idea  about  himself,  and  about  what  a  thing  would 
have  to  be,  in  this  world,  if  he  was  connected  with  it.  He  pro- 
posed to  enjoy  his  business.  He  was  spending  most  of  his 
time  at  it. 

Other  people  have  had  this  same  happy  thought,  but  they 
seem  to  manage  to  keep  on  being  patient.  Non  could  not  fall 
back  on  being  patient,  and  it  made  him  think  harder. 

The  first  thing  he  thought  of  was  that  doing  his  business  as 
he  thought  he  ought  to,  if  he  once  worked  his  idea  out,  and 
worked  it  down  through  and  organized  it,  might  pay.  He 
almost  had  the  belief  that  people  might  pay  a  man  a  little  extra, 
perhaps,  for  enjoying  his  business.  It  cannot  be  said  that  he 
believed  this  immediately.  He  merely  wanted  to,  and  worked 
toward  it,  and  merely  contrived  new  shrewd  ways  at  first  of 
being  able  to  afford  it.  Gradually  he  began  to  notice  that  the 
more  he  enjoyed  his  business,  the  more  he  enjoyed  it  with  his 
whole  soul  and  body,  enjoyed  it  down  to  the  very  toes  of  his 
conscience,  the  more  people  there  were  who  stepped  into  his 
office  and  wanted  him  to  enjoy  his  business  on  their  houses. 
It  was  what  they  had  been  looking  for  for  years  —  for  some 
builder  who  was  really  enjoying  his  business.  And  the  more  he 
enjoyed  his  business  in  his  own  particular  way  —  that  of  build- 
ing a  house  for  a  man  in  less  time  than  he  said  he  would,  and 


100  CROWDS 

for  less  money,  not  infrequently  sending  him  a  check  at  the  end 
of  it  —  the  more  his  business  grew. 

I  do  not  know  that  there  would  be  any  special  harm  in  speak- 
ing of  Non's  idea  —  of  just  doing  as  you  would  be  done  by  — 
in  more  moral  or  religious  language,  but  it  is  not  necessary. 
And  I  find  I  take  an  almost  religious  joy  in  looking  at  the  Golden 
Rule  at  last  as  a  plain  business  proposition.  All  that  happened 
was  that  Non  was  original,  saw  something  that  everybody 
thought  they  knew,  and  acted  as  if  it  were  so.  Theoretically 
one  would  not  have  said  that  it  would  be  original  to  take  an  old 
platitudinous  law  like  the  law  of  supply  and  demand,  and  act 
as  if  it  were  so;  but  it  was.  At  the  time  Non  was  beginning  his 
career  there  was  nothing  in  the  building-market  people  found 
harder  to  hire  than  honesty.  Here  was  something,  he  saw  at 
last,  that  thousands  of  busy  and  important  men  who  did  not 
have  time  to  be  detectives,  wanted.  There  did  not  seem  to  be 
any  one  very  actively  supplying  the  demand.  A  big  market, 
a  small  supply,  and  almost  no  competition.  Non  stepped  in 
and  proposed  to  represent  a  man's  interest  who  is  building  a 
house  as  literally  as  the  man  would  represent  his  interests  him- 
self, if  he  knew  all  about  houses.  Everything  has  followed  from 
this.  What  Non's  business  is  now,  when  a  man  is  building  a 
house,  is  to  step  quietly  into  the  man's  shoes,  let  him  put  on  an- 
other pair,  and  go  about  his  business.  It  is  not  necessary  to  go 
into  the  details.  Any  reader  who  has  ever  built  a  house  knows 
the  details.     Just  take  them  and  turn  them  around. 

What  those  of  us  who  know  Non  best  like  about  him  is  that 
he  is  a  plain  business  man,  and  that  he  has  acted  in  this  par- 
ticular matter  without  any  fine  moral  frills  or  remarks.  He  has 
done  the  thing  because  he  liked  it  and  believed  in  it. 

But  the  most  efl&cient  thing  to  me  about  Non  is  not  the  way 
he  is  making  money  out  of  saving  money  for  other  people,  but 
the  way  the  fact  that  he  can  do  it  makes  people  feel  about  the 
world.  Whenever  I  have  a  little  space  of  discouragement  or  of 
impatience  about  the  world  because  it  does  not  hurry  more,  I 


SHOULD  GOOD  PEOPLE  BE  EFFICIENT?      101 

fall  to  thinking  of  Non.  "Perhaps  next  week"  —  I  say  to  my- 
self cheerfully  —  "I  can  go  down  to  New  York  and  slip  into 
Non's  office  and  get  the  latest  news  as  to  how  religion  is  getting 
on.  Or  he  will  take  me  out  with  him  to  lunch,  and  I  will  stop 
scolding  or  idealizing,  and  we  will  get  down  to  business,  and  I 
will  take  a  good  long  look  into  that  steady -lighted,  unsentimental 
face  of  his  while  he  tells  me  across  the  little  corner  table  at  Del- 
monico's  forthree  hours  how  shrewd  the  Golden  Rule  is,  andhow 
it  works.  Sometimes  when  I  have  just  been  in  New  York,  and 
have  coijie  home  and  am  sitting  in  my  still  study,  with  the  big 
idle  mountain  just  outside,  and  the  great  meadow  and  all  the 
world,  like  some  great,  calm  gentle  spirit  or  picture  of  itself,  lying 
out  there  about  me,  and  I  fall  to  thinking  of  Non,  and  of  how  he 
is  working  in  wood  and  stone  inside  of  people's  houses,  and  in- 
sideof  their  lives  day  after  day,  and  of  how  he  is  touching  people 
at  a  thousand  points  all  the  weeks,  being  a  writer,  making  lights 
and  shadows  and  little  visions  of  words  fall  together  just  so, 
seems,  suddenly  a  very  trivial  occupation  —  like  amusing  one's 
self  with  a  pretty  little  safe  kaleidoscope,  holding  it  up,  aiming  it 
and  shaking  softly  one's  coloured  bits  of  phrases  at  a  world! 
Of  course,  it  need  not  be  so.  But  there  are  moments  when  I 
think  of  Non  when  it  seems  so. 

In  our  regular  Sunday  religion  we  do  not  seem  to  be  quite  at 
our  best  just  now. 

At  least  (perhaps  I  should  speak  for  one)  I  know  I  am  not. 

Being  a  saint  of  late  is  getting  to  be  a  kind  of  homely,  modest, 
informal,  almost  menial  everyday  thing.  It  makes  one  more 
hopeful  about  religion.  Perhaps  people  who  once  get  the  habit, 
and  who  are  being  good  all  the  week,  can  even  be  good  on 
Sunday. 

There  are  many  ways  of  resting  or  leaning  back  upon  one's 
instincts  and  getting  over  to  one's  religion  or  perspective  about 
the  world.  Mount  Tom  (which  is  in  my  front  yard,  in  Massa- 
chusetts) helps  sometimes  —  with  a  single  look. 

When  I  go  down  to  New  York,  I  look  at  the  Metropolitan 


102  CROWDS 

Tower,  the  Pennsylvania  Station,  the  McAdoo  Tunnels,  and 
at  Non. 

If  I  wanted  to  make  anybody  religious,  I  would  try  to  get 
him  to  work  in  Non's  office,  or  work  with  anybody  who  ever 
worked  with  him,  or  who  ever  saw  him;  or  I  would  have  him 
live  in  a  house  built  by  him,  or  pay  a  bill  made  out  by  him. 

It  has  seemed  to  me  that  his  succeeding  and  making  him- 
self succeed  in  this  way  is  a  great  spiritual  adventure,  a  pure 
religion,  a  difficult,  fresh,  and  stupendous  religion. 

Now  these  many  days  have  I  watched  him  going  up  and  down 
through  all  the  empty  reputations,  the  unmeaning  noises  of  the 
world,  living  his  life  like  some  low,  old-fashioned,  modest 
Hymn  Tune  he  keeps  whistling  —  and  I  have  seen  him  in  fear, 
and  in  danger,  and  in  gladness  being  shrewder  and  shrewder 
for  God,  now  grimly,  now  radiantly,  hour  by  hour,  day  by 
day  getting  rich  with  the  Holy  Ghost ! 


CHAPTER  III 

IS  IT  WRONG  FOR  GOOD  PEOPLE  TO  BE 
INTERESTING? 

PEOPLE  are  acquiring  automobiles,  Oriental  rugs,  five- 
hundred-dollar  gowns,  more  rapidly  just  now  than  they  are 
goodness,  because  advertisements  in  this  present  generation 
are  more  readable  than  sermons,  and  because  the  shop  windows 
on  Fifth  Avenue  can  attract  more  attention  than  the  churches. 

The  shop  windows  make  people  covetous. 

If  the  goodness  that  one  sees,  hears  about,  or  goes  by  does  not 
make  other  people  covetous,  does  not  make  them  wish  they  had 
it  or  some  just  like  it,  it  must  be  because  there  is  something  the 
matter  with  it,  or  something  the  matter  with  the  way  it  is  dis- 
played. 

If  the  church  shop  windows,  for  instance,  were  to  make  dis- 
plays of  goodness  up  and  down  the  great  Moral  Fifth  Avenue  of 
the  world  —  well,  one  does  not  know;  but  there  are  some  of  us 
who  would  rather  expect  to  see  the  Goodness  Display  in  the 
windows  consisting  largely  of  Things  People  Ought  Not  to 
Want. 

There  would  be  rows  and  tiers  of  Not-Things  piled  up  — 
Things  for  People  Not  to  Be,  and  Things  for  People  Not  To 
Do. 

Goodness  displayed  in  this  way  is  not  interesting. 

Perhaps  this  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  the  word  Goodness 
spoils  a  thing  for  people  —  so  many  people  —  when  it  is  allowed 
in  it. 

Possibly  it  is  because  we  are  apt  to  think  of  the  good  people, 
and  of  the  people  who  are  being  good,  as  largely  keeping  from 

103 


104  CROWDS 

doing  something,  or  as  keeping  other  people  from  doing  some- 
thing —  as  negative.  Their  goodness  seems  to  consist  in  being 
morally  accurate,  and  in  being  very  particular  just  in  time,  and 
in  a  kind  of  general  holding  in. 

We  do  not  naturally  or  off-hand  —  any  of  us  —  think  of  good- 
ness as  having  much  of  a  lunge  to  it.  It  is  tired-looking  and 
discouraged,  and  pulls  back  kindly  and  gently.  Or  it  teases 
and  says,  "Please"  —  God  knows  how  helpless  it  is,  and  I  for 
one  am  frank  to  say  that,  as  far  as  I  have  observed,  He  has  not 
been  paying  very  much  attention  to  good  people  of  late. 

I  do  not  believe  I  am  alone  in  this.  There  must  be  thousands 
of  others  who  have  this  same  half-guilty,  half-defiant  feeling 
of  suspiciousness  toward  what  people  seem  to  think  should  be 
called  goodness.  Not  that  we  say  anything.  We  merely  keep 
wondering  -  we  cannot  see  what  it  is,  exactly,  about  goodness 
that  should  make  it  so  depressing 

In  the  meantime  we  hold  on.  We  do  not  propose  to  give  up 
believing  in  it.  Perhaps,  after  all,  all  that  is  the  matter  with 
goodness  in  the  United  States  is  the  people  who  have  taken 
hold  of  it. 

They  do  not  seem  to  be  the  kind  of  people  who  can  make  it 
interesting.  We  cannot  help  thinking,  if  these  same  bad  people 
about  us,  or  people  who  are  called  bad,  would  only  take  up 
goodness  awhile,  how  they  would  make  it  hum! 

I  can  only  speak  for  one,  but  I  do  not  deny  that  when  I  have 
been  sitting  (in  some  churches),  or  associating,  owing  to  cir- 
cumstances, with  very  good  people  a  little  longer  than  usual,  and 
come  out  into  the  street,  I  feel  like  stepping  up  sometimes  to 
the  first  fine,  brisk,  businesslike  man  I  see  going  by,  and  saying, 
"  My  dear  sir,  I  do  wish  that  you  would  take  up  goodness 
awhile  and  see  if,  after  all,  something  cannot  really  be  done. 
I  keep  on  trying  to  be  hopeful,  but  these  dear  good  people  in 
here,  it  seems  to  me,  are  making  a  terrible  mess  of  it!" 

And,  to  make  a  long  story  short,  Lim  happened  to  be  going 
by  one  day,  and  this  practically  is  what  I  did.     I  had  done  it 


SHOULD  GOOD  PEOPLE  BE  INTERESTING?  105 

before  with  other  business  men  in  spirit  or  in  a  general  way,  but 
with  him  I  was  more  particular.  I  went  straight  to  the  point. 
"Here  are  at  least  sixteen  valuable  efficient  brands  of  goodness 
in  America,"  I  said,  "all  worth  their  weight  in  gold  for  a  big 
business  career,  that  no  one  is  really  using,  that  no  one  quite 
believes  in  or  can  get  on  the  market,  and  yet  I  believe  with  my 
whole  soul  in  them  all,  and  I  believe  thousands  of  other  men  do, 
or  are  ready  to,  the  moment  some  one  makes  a  start." 

I  pulled  out  a  little  list  of  items  which  I  had  made  out  and 
put  down  on  a  piece  of  paper,  and  handed  them  over  to  him, 
and  said  I  wished  he  would  take  a  few  of  them  —  the  first  five 
or  six  or  so  —  and  make  them  work. 

He  already  had,  I  found,  made  two  or  three  of  the  harder  ones 
work. 

I  would  not  have  any  one  suppose  for  a  moment  that  I  am 
presenting  Lim  as  a  kind  of  business  angel. 

No  one  who  knows  Lim  thinks  of  him,  or  would  let  anybody 
else  think  of  him,  as  being  a  Select  Person,  as  being  particularly 
or  egregiously  what  he  ought  to  be.  This  is  one  reason  I  have 
picked  him  out.  Being  good  in  a  small  private  way,  just  as  a 
small  private  end  in  itself,  may  be  practicable  perhaps  without 
dragging  in  people  who  are  not  quite  what  they  ought  to  be. 
But  the  moment  one  tries  to  make  goodness  work,  one  comes 
to  the  fact  that  it  must  be  made  to  work  with  what  we  have. 
We  have  a  great  crowd  of  unselected  people,  people  both  good 
and  bad,  and  the  first  principle  in  making  goodness  work  (in- 
stead of  being  merely  good)  seems  to  be  to  believe  that  goodness 
is  not  too  good  for  anybody.  Anybody  who  can  make  it  work 
,  can  have  it,  and  what  goodness  seems  to  need,  especially  in 
America  and  England  just  now,  is  people  who  do  not  feel  that 
they  must  at  all  hazards  look  good.  Whatever  happens,  what- 
ever else  we  do  in  any  general  investment  or  movement  we  may 
be  making  with  goodness,  we  must  let  these  people  in.  If 
there  is  one  thing  rather  than  another  that  those  of  us  who  know 
Lim  all  rely  on  and  like,  it  is  that  nothing  can  ever  make  him 


106  CROWDS 

slump  down  into  looking  good.  We  often  find  him  hard  to 
make  out  —  everything  is  left  open  and  loose  and  unlabelled 
in  Lim's  moral  nature.  The  only  really  sure  way  any  one  can 
tell  when  Lim  is  being  good  is,  that  whenever  he  is  being  good 
he  becomes  suddenly  and  unexpectedly  interesting.  His  good- 
ness is  daring,  unexpected,  and  original.  One  has  the  feeling 
that  it  may  break  out  anywhere.  It  is  always  doing  things 
that  everybody  said  could  not  be  done  before.  It  is  true  that 
some  people  are  dazed,  and  no  one  can  ever  seem  to  feel  sure 
he  knows  what  it  is  that  is  going  on  in  Lim  when  he  is  being 
good,  or  that  it  is  goodness.  He  merely  keeps  watching  it. 
There  is  a  certain  element  of  news,  of  freshness,  of  gentle  sen- 
sation, in  his  goodness.  It  leads  to  consequences.  And  there 
always  seems  to  be  something  about  Lim's  goodness  which 
attracts  the  attention  of  people,  and  makes  people  who  see  it 
want  it.  So  when  I  speak  of  goodness  in  this  book,  and  put  it 
down  as  the  basis  of  the  power  of  getting  men  to  do  as  one 
likes,  I  do  not  deny  that  I  am  taking  the  word  away  and  moving 
it  over  from  its  usual  associations.  I  do  not  mean  by  a  good 
act,  a  good-looking  act,  but  an  act  so  constituted  that  it  makes 
good.  For  the  purpose  of  this  book  I  would  define  goodness  as 
eflBciency.  Goodness  is  the  quality  in  a  thing  that  makes  the 
thing  go,  and  that  makes  it  go  so  that  it  will  not  run  down, 
and  that  nothing  can  stop  it. 

There  is  the  inefficiency  of  lying,  for  instance,  and  the  inef 
ficiency  of  force,  or  bullying. 


CHAPTER  IV 
PROSPECTS  OF  THE  LIAR 

MY  THEORY  about  the  Liar  is  that  it  is  of  no  use  to  scold 
him  or  blame  him.  It  merely  makes  him  feel  superior.  He 
should  be  looked  upon  quietly  and  without  saying  anything  as  a 
case  of  arrested  development.  What  has  happened  to  him  is 
that  he  merely  is  not  quite  bright  about  himself,  and  has  failed 
to  see  how  bright  (in  the  long  run)  other  people  are. 

When  a  man  hes  or  does  any  other  wrong  thing,  his  real  fail- 
ure consists  not  in  the  wrongdoing  itself,  but  in  his  failure  to 
take  pains  to  focus  his  mind  on  the  facts  in  himself,  and  in  the 
people  about  him,  and  see  what  it  really  is  that  he  would  wish  he 
had  done,  say  in  twenty  years.  It  seems  to  be  possible,  after  a 
clumsy  fashion,  to  find  out  by  a  study  of  ourselves,  and  of  our 
own  lives  and  of  other  men's  lives,  what  we  would  wish  we  had 
done  afterward.  Everything  we  have  learned  so  far  we  have 
learned  by  guessing  wrong  on  what  we  have  thought  we  would 
want  afterward.  We  have  gradually  guessed  what  we  wanted 
better.  We  began  our  lives  as  children  with  all  sorts  of  inter- 
esting sins  or  moral  guesses  and  experiments.  We  find  there 
are  certain  sins  or  moral  experiments  we  almost  never  use  any 
more  because  we  found  that  they  never  worked.  We  had  been 
deceived  about  them.  Most  of  us  have  tried  lying.  Since 
we  were  very  small  we  have  tried  in  every  possible  fashion  — 
now  in  one  way,  now  in  another  —  to  see  if  lying  could  not  be 
made  to  work.  By  tar  the  majority  of  us,  and  all  of  us  who  are 
the  most  intelligent,  are  not  deceived  now  by  our  desire  to  tell 
lies.  Perhaps  we  have  not  learned  that  all  lies  do  not  pay.  A 
child  tells  a  He  at  first  as  if  a  lie  had  never  been  thought  of  be- 

107 


108  CROWDS 

fore.  It  is  as  if  lying  had  just  been  invented,  and  he  liad  just 
thought  what  a  great  convenience  it  was,  and  how  many  things 
there  were  that  he  could  do  in  that  way.  He  discovers  that  the 
particular  thing  he  wants  at  the  moment,  he  gets  very  often  by 
lying.  But  the  next  time  he  lies,  he  cannot  get  anything.  If 
he  keeps  on  lying  for  a  long  time,  he  learns  that  while,  after  a 
fashion,  he  is  getting  things,  he  is  losing  people.  Finally,  he 
finds  he  cannot  even  get  things.  Nobody  believes  in  him  or 
trusts  him.  He  cannot  be  efficient.  He  then  decides  that 
being  trusted,  and  having  people  who  feel  safe  to  associate  with 
him  and  to  do  business  with  him,  is  the  thing  he  really  wants 
most;  and  that  he  must  have  first,  even  if  it  is  only  a  way  to  get 
the  other  things  he  wants.  It  need  not  be  wondered  that  the 
Trusts,  those  huge  raw  youngsters  of  the  modern  spirit,  have 
had  to  go  through  with  most  of  the  things  other  boys  have. 
The  Trusts  have  had  to  go  through,  one  after  the  other,  all  their 
children's  diseases,  and  try  their  funny  little  moral  experiments 
on  the  world.  They  thought  they  could  lie  at  first.  They 
thought  it  would  be  cunning,  and  that  it  would  work.  They 
did  not  realize  at  once  that  the  bigger  a  boy  you  were,  even  if 
you  were  anonymous,  the  more  your  lie  showed  and  the  more 
people  there  were  who  suffered  from  it  who  would  be  bound 
sooner  or  later  to  call  you  to  account  for  it. 

The  Trusts  have  been  guessing  wrong  on  what  they  would 
wish  they  had  done  in  twenty  years,  and  the  best  of  them  now 
are  trying  to  guess  better.  They  are  trying  to  acquire  prestige 
by  being  far-sighted  for  themselves  and  far-sighted  for  the  peo- 
ple who  deal  with  them,  and  are  resting  their  policy  on  winning 
confidence  and  on  keeping  faith  with  the  people. 

They  not  only  tried  lying,  like  all  young  children,  but 
they  tried  stealing.  For  years  the  big  corporations  could  be 
seen  going  around  from  one  big  innocent  city  in  this  country 
to  another,  and  standing  by  quietly  and  without  saying  a  word, 
putting  the  streets  in  their  pockets. 

But  no  big  corporation  of  the  first  class  to-day  would  begin 


PROSPECTS  OF  THE  LIAR  109 

its  connection  with  a  city  in  this  fashion.  Beginning  a  per- 
manent business  relation  with  a  customer  by  making  him  sorry 
afterward  he  has  had  any  deahngs  with  you,  has  gone  by  as  a 
method  of  getting  business  in  England  and  America. 

One  of  our  big  American  magazines  not  long  ago,  which  had 
gained  especially  high  rates  from  its  advertisers  because  they 
believed  in  it,  lied  about  its  circulation.  The  man  who  was 
responsible  was  not  precisely  sure,  gave  nominal  figures  in  round 
numbers,  and  did  what  magazines  very  commonly  did  under  the 
circumstances;  but  when  the  magazine  owner  looked  up  details 
afterward  and  learned  precisely  what  the  circulation  was  for 
the  particular  issue  concerned,  he  sent  out  announcements  to 
every  firm  in  the  country  that  had  anything  in  the  columns  of 
that  issue,  saying  that  the  firm  had  lied,  and  enclosing  a  check 
for  the  difference  in  value  represented.  Of  course  it  was  a  good 
stroke  of  business,  eating  national  humble  pie  so,  and  it  was  a 
cheap  stroke  of  business  too,  doing  some  one,  sudden,  striking 
thing  that  no  one  would  forget.  Not  an  advertisement  could  be 
inserted  and  paid  for  in  the  magazine  for  years  without  having 
that  action,  and  the  prestige  of  that  action,  back  of  it.  Every 
shred  of  virtue  there  was  in  the  action  could  have  been  set  one 
side,  and  was  set  one  side  by  many  people,  because  it  paid  so 
well.  Every  one  saw  suddenly,  and  with  a  faint  breath  of 
astonishment,  how  honesty  worked.  But  the  main  point 
about  the  magazine  in  distinction  from  its  competitors  seems  to 
have  been  that  it  not  merely  saw  how  honesty  worked,  but  it 
saw  it  first  and  it  had  the  originahty,  the  moral  shrewdness  and 
courage,  to  put  up  money  on  it.  It  believed  in  honesty  so  hard 
that  suddenly  one  morning,  before  all  the  world,  it  risked  its 
entire  fortune  on  it.  Now  that  it  has  been  done  once,  the  new 
level  or  standard  of  candour  may  be  said  to  have  been  established 
which  others  will  have  to  follow.  But  it  does  not  seem  to  me 
that  the  kind  of  man  who  has  the  moral  originality  to  dare  do  a 
thing  like  this  first  need  ever  have  any  serious  trouble  with 
competitors.     In  the  last  analysis,  in  the  competition  of  modern 


110  CROWDS 

business  to  get  the  crowd,  the  big  success  is  bound  to  come  to 
men  in  the  one  region  of  competition  where  competition  still 
has  some  give  in  it  —  the  region  of  moral  originality.  Other 
things  in  competition  nowadays  have  all  been  thought  of  except 
being  good.  Any  man  who  can  and  will  to-day  think  out  new 
and  unlooked-for  ways  of  being  good  can  get  ahead,  in  the 
United  States  of  practically  everybody. 


CHAPTER  V 
PROSPECTS  OF  THE  BULLY 

THE  stage  properties  that  go  with  a  bully  change  as  we  grow 
older.  When  one  thinks  of  a  bully,  one  usually  sees  a  picture 
at  once  in  one's  mind.  It  is  a  big  boy  lording  it  over  a  little 
one,  or  getting  him  down  and  sitting  on  him. 

Everybody  recognizes  what  is  going  on  immediately,  pitches 
in  nobly  and  beautifully,  and  licks  the  big  boy. 

The  trouble  with  the  bully  in  business  has  been  that  he  is  not 
so  simple  and  easy  to  recognize.  He  is  apt  to  be  more  or  less 
anonymous  and  impersonal,  and  it  is  harder  to  hit  him  in  the 
right  place. 

But  when  one  thinks  of  it  perhaps  this  pleasant  and  inspiring 
duty  is  not  so  impracticable  as  it  looks,  and  is  presently  to  be 
attended  to. 

Any  man  who  relies,  in  getting  what  he  wants,  on  being  big 
instead  of  being  right,  is  a  bully. 

Modern  business  is  done  over  a  wide  area,  with  thousands 
of  persons  looking  on,  and  for  a  long  time  and  with  thousands  of 
people  coming  back.  The  man  who  relies  on  being  big  instead 
of  being  right,  and  who  takes  advantage  of  his  position  instead 
of  his  inherent  superiority,  is  soon  seen  through.  His  customers 
go  over  to  the  enemy.  A  show  of  force  or  a  hold-up  works 
very  well  at  the  moment.  Being  bigger  may  be  more  showy 
than  being  right,  and  it  may  down  the  Little  Boy,  but  the  Little 
Boy  wins  the  crowd. 

Business  to-day  consists  in  persuading  crowds. 

The  Little  Boy  can  prove  he  is  right.  All  the  bully  can  prove 
is  that  he  is  bigger. 

Ill 


112  CROWDS 

The  Liar  in  Business  is  already  going  by. 

Now  it  is  the  turn  of  the  bully. 

Not  long  ago  a  few  advertisers  in  a  big  American  city  wanted 
unfairly  low  rates  for  advertisements  and  tried  to  use  force  with 
the  newspapers.  Three  or  four  of  the  biggest  shops  combined 
and  gave  notice  that  they  would  take  their  advertising  away 
unless  the  rates  came  down.  After  a  little,  they  drew  in  a  few 
other  lines  of  business  with  them,  and  suddenly  one  morning 
five  or  six  full  pages  of  advertisements  were  withdrawn  from 
every  newspaper  in  the  city.  The  newspapers  went  on  pub- 
lishing all  the  news  of  the  city  except  news  as  to  what  people 
could  buy  in  department  stores,  and  waited.  They  made  no 
counter-move  of  any  kind,  and  said  nothing  and  seven  days 
slipped  past.  They  held  to  the  claim  that  the  service  they  per- 
formed in  connecting  the  great  stores  with  the  people  of  the 
city  was  a  real  service,  that  it  represented  market  value  which 
could  be  proved  and  paid  for.  They  kept  on  for  another  week 
publishing  for  the  people  all  the  news  of  the  city  except  the 
news  as  to  how  they  could  spend  their  money.  They  won- 
dered how  long  it  would  take  the  great  shops  with  acres  of 
things  to  sell  to  see  how  it  would  work  not  to  let  anybody  know 
what  the  things  were. 

The  great  shops  tried  other  ways  of  letting  people  know. 
They  tried  handbills,  a  huge  helpless  patter  of  them  over  all  the 
city.  They  used  billboards,  and  posted  huge  lists  of  items  for 
people  to  stop  and  read  in  the  streets,  if  they  wanted  to,  while 
they  rushed  by.  For  three  whole  weeks  they  held  on  tight  to 
the  idea  that  the  newspapers  were  striking  employees  of  de- 
partment stores.  One  would  have  thought  that  they  would 
have  seen  that  the  newspapers  were  the  representatives  of  the 
people  —  almost  the  homes  of  the  people  —  and  that  it  would 
pay  to  treat  them  respectfully.  One  would  have  thought  they 
would  have  seen  that  if  they  wanted  space  in  the  homes  of  the 
people  —  places  at  their  very  breakfast  tables  —  space  that 
the  newspapers  had  earned  and  acquired  there,  they  would 


PROSPECTS  OF  THE  BULLY.  113 

have  to  pay  their  share  of  what  it  had  cost  the  newspapers  to 
get  it. 

One  would  have  thought  that  the  department  shops  would 
have  seen  that  the  more  they  could  make  the  newspapers  pros- 
per, the  more  influence  the  newspapers  would  have  in  the  homes 
of  the  people,  and  the  more  business  they  could  get  through 
them.  But  it  was  not  until  the  shopowners  had  come  down 
and  gazed  day  after  day  on  the  big,  white,  lonely  floors  of  their 
shops  that  they  saw  the  truth.  Crowds  stayed  away,  and  proved 
it  to  them.  Namely:  a  store,  if  it  uses  a  great  newspaper,  in- 
stead of  having  a  few  feet  of  show  windows  on  a  street  for  people 
to  walk  by,  gets  practically  miles  of  show  windows  for  people  — 
in  their  own  houses  —  sells  its  goods  almost  any  morning  to  the 
people  —  to  a  whole  city  —  before  anybody  gets  up  from  break- 
fast —  has  its  duties  as  well  as  its  rights. 

Of  course,  when  the  shopkeepers  really  saw  that  this  was 
what  the  newspapers  had  been  doing  for  them,  they  wanted  to 
do  what  was  right,  and  wanted  to  pay  for  it.  One  would  have 
thought,  looking  at  it  theoretically,  that  the  department  stores 
in  any  city  would  have  imagination  enough  to  see,  without 
practically  having  to  shut  their  stores  up  for  three  weeks,  what 
advertising  was  worth.  But  if  great  department  stores  do  not 
have  imagination  to  see  what  they  would  wish  they  had  done  in 
twenty  years,  in  one  year,  or  three  weeks,  and  have  to  spell  out 
the  experience  morning  by  morning  and  see  what  works,  word 
by  word,  they  do  learn  in  the  end  that  being  right  works,  and 
that  bullying  does  not.  Gradually  the  level  or  standard  of 
right  in  business  is  bound  to  rise,  until  people  have  generally 
come  to  take  the  Golden  Rule  with  the  literalness  and  serious- 
ness that  the  best  and  biggest  men  are  already  taking  it. 
Department  stores  that  have  the  moral  originality  and  imagi- 
nation to  guess  what  people  would  wish  they  had  bought  of 
them  and  what  they  would  wish  they  had  sold  to  them  after- 
ward are  going  to  win.  Department  stores  that  deal  with  their 
customers  three  or  four  years  ahead  are  the  ones  that  win  first. 


CHAPTER  VI 
GOODNESS  AS  A  CROWD-PROCESS 

THE  basis  of  successful  business  is  imagination  about  other 
people.  The  best  way  to  train  one's  imagination  about  other 
people  is  to  try  different  ways  of  being  of  service  to  them. 
Trying  different  ways  of  merely  getting  money  out  of  them 
does  not  train  the  imagination.     It  is  too  easy. 

Business  is  going  to  be  before  long  among  the  noblest  of  the 
professions,  because  it  takes  the  highest  order  of  imagination  to 
succeed  in  it.  Goodness  is  no  longer  a  Sunday  school.  The 
whole  world,  in  a  rough  way,  is  its  own  Sunday  school. 

To  have  the  most  brains  render  the  most  service  —  render 
services  people  had  never  dreamed  of  before. 

Why  bother  to  tell  people  to  be  good.'*  It  bores  us.  It  bores 
them.  Presently  we  will  tell  them  over  our  shoulders,  as 
we  go  by,  to  use  their  brains.  Goodness  is  a  by-product  of 
efficiency. 

Being  good  every  day  in  business  stands  in  no  need  of  being 
stood  up  for,  or  apologized  for,  or  even  helped.  All  of  these 
things  may  be  expedient  and  human  and  natural,  because  one 
cannot  help  being  interested  in  particular  people  and  in  a 
particular  generation;  but  they  are  not  really  necessary  to 
goodness.  It  is  only  when  we  are  tired,  or  when  we  only  half 
believe  in  it,  that  we  feel  to-day  that  goodness  needs  to  be 
stood  up  for.  In  a  day  when  men  make  vast  crowds  of  things, 
so  that  the  things  are  seen  everywhere,  and  when  the  things  are 
made  to  stand  the  test  of  crowds  —  crowds  of  days,  or  crowds 
of  years  —  and  when  they  make  them  for  crowds  of  people, 
goodness  does  not  need  scared  and  helpful  people  defending  it. 

114 


GOODNESS  AS  A  CROWD-PROCESS  115 

/  have  seen  that  goodness  is  a  thing  to  be  sung  about  like  a 
sunset.  I  have  seen  that  goodness  is  organic,  and  grounded 
in  the  nature  of  things  and  in  the  nature  of  man.  I  have  seen 
that  being  good  is  the  one  great  adventure  of  the  world,  the 
huge  daily  passionate  moral  experiment  of  the  human  heart  — 
that  all  men  are  at  work  on  it,  that  goodness  is  an  implacable 
crowd  process,  and  that  nothing  can  stop  it. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THOUGHTS  ON  BEING  IMPROVED  BY 
OTHER  PEOPLE 

BUT  Fate  has  so  arranged  our  lives  that  we  all  have  to  live 
cooped  up  in  one  particular  generation.  Living  in  all  of  them, 
especially  the  ages  just  ahead,  and  seeing  as  one  looks  out  upon 
them  how  goodness  wins,  may  be  well  enough  when  one  is  tired 
or  discouraged  and  is  driven  to  it,  but  in  the  meantime  all  the 
while  we  are  living  in  this  one.  The  faces  of  the  people  we  know 
flit  past  us;  the  gaunt,  grim  face  of  the  crowd  haunts  us  —  the 
crowd  that  will  slip  softly  off  the  earth  very  soon  and  drop  into 
the  Darkness  —  a  whole  generation  of  it,  without  seeing  how 
things  are  coming  out;  and  there  is  something  about  the  streets, 
about  the  look  of  women  as  they  go  by,  something  about  the 
faces  of  the  little  children,  that  makes  one  wish  goodness  would 
hurry.  One  cannot  think  with  any  real  pleasure  of  goodness  as 
a  huge,  slow,  implacable  moral  glacier,  a  kind  of  human  force 
of  gravity,  grinding  out  truths  and  grinding  under  people, 
generation  after  generation,  down  toward  some  vast,  beautiful, 
happy  valley  with  flowers  and  children  in  it  and  majestic  old 
men  thousands  of  years  away.  One  wishes  goodness  would 
hurry.  We  are  not  content,  some  of  us,  with  having  the  good 
people  climb  over  the  so-called  evil  ones  and  gain  the  supremacy 
of  the  world,  and  all  because  the  evil  people  do  not  see  what 
they  really  want  to  do  or  would  have  wished  they  had  done 
afterward.  We  want  the  evil  ones,  so  called,  to  see  what  they 
really  want  now.  We  cannot  help  believing  that  there  is  some 
way  of  attracting  their  attention  to  what  they  really  want  now. 

I  have  seen,  or  seemed  to  see,  in  my  time  that  there  is  almost 

116 


ON  BEING  IMPROVED  BY  OTHER  PEOPLE    117 

no  limit  to  what  people  can  do  if  they  can  get  their  own  atten- 
tion, or  if  some  person  or  some  event  will  happen  by  that  can 
get  their  attention  for  them. 

Paralytics  jumped  from  their  beds  at  the  time  of  the  San 
Francisco  earthquake  and  ran  for  blocks.  The  whole  earth 
had  to  shake  them  in  order  to  get  their  attention;  but  it  did  it. 
and  they  saw  what  it  was  they  wanted,  and  they  ran  for  it  at 
once,  whether  they  were  paralytics  or  not.  In  the  fire  that 
followed  the  earthquake,  people  that  had  been  sick  in  bed  for 
weeks  were  seen,  scores  of  them,  dragging  their  trunks  through 
the  streets. 

I  have  seen,  too,  in  my  time  scores  of  people  doing  great  feats 
of  goodness  in  this  way,  things  that  they  knew  they  could 
not  do,  dragging  huge  moral  trunks  after  them,  or  swinging 
them  up  on  their  shoulders.  I  have  seen  men  who  thought 
they  were  old  in  their  hearts,  and  who  thought  they  were  wicked, 
running  like  boys,  with  shouts  and  cheers,  to  do  right.  It  was 
all  a  matter  of  attention.  The  question  with  most  of  us  would 
seem  to  be:  How  can  one  get  one's  attention  to  what  one  would 
vvish  one  had  done  in  twenty  years,  and  how  can  one  get  other 
people's  —  all  the  people  with  whom  we  are  living  and  work- 
ing —  to  do  with  us  what  they  would  wish  they  had  done,  in 
twenty  minutes,  twenty  days,  or  twenty  years  .?* 

Letting  the  Crowd  be  Good,  all  turns  in  the  long  run  upon 
touching  the  imagination  of  Crowds. 

In  the  last  analysis,  the  coming  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven, 
as  it  has  been  called,  is  going  to  be  the  coming  slowly,  and  from 
unsuspected  quarters,  of  a  new  piety  and  of  new  kinds  of  saints 
into  the  forefront  of  modern  life  —  saints  who  can  attract 
attention,  saints  who  can  make  crowds  think  what  they  really 
want. 

Using  the  word  in  its  more  special  sense,  the  time  has  come 
when  it  is  being  keenly  realized  that  if  goodness  is  to  be  properly 
appreciated  by  crowds,  it  must  be  properly  advertised. 

How  can  goodness  be  advertised  to  Crowds? 


118  CROWDS 

Who  are  the  people  that  can  touch  the  imagination  of  Crowds? 

The  best  and  most  suggestive  truths  that  most  of  us  could 
come  to  with  regard  to  doing  right,  would  come  from  a  study 
of  the  people  who  have  tried  to  make  us  do  it.  Most  of  us,  if 
we  were  asked  to  name  the  people  most  prominently  connected 
with  the  virtues  that  we  have  studied  and  wondered  about  most, 
would  mention,  probably,  either  our  parents  or  our  preachers. 
Many  of  us  feel  quite  expert  about  parents.  We  have  studied 
vividly,  and  sometimes  with  almost  a  breathless  interest,  all 
their  little  ways  of  getting  us  to  be  good,  and  there  is  hardly 
any  one  who  has  not  come  to  quite  definite  conclusions  of  how 
he  should  be  preached  to.  I  have  thought  it  would  be  not 
unfruitful  to  consider  in  this  connection  either  our  parents  or 
our  preachers.  I  have  decided  to  consider  the  preachers  who 
try  to  make  me  good,  because  they  are  a  little  less  complicated 
than  parents. 

Preachers  can  only  be  put  into  classes  in  a  general  way. 
They  often  overlap,  and  many  of  them  change  over  from  one 
class  into  another  every  now  and  then  on  some  special  subject, 
or  on  some  special  line  of  experience  which  they  have  had. 
But  for  the  most  part,  at  least  as  regards  emphasis,  preachers 
may  be  said  to  divide  off  into  three  classes : 

Those  who  tease  us  to  do  right. 

Those  who  make  us  see  that  doing  right,  if  any  one  wants 
to  do  it,  is  really  an  excellent  thing. 

Those  who  make  us  want  to  do  it. 


I  never  go  to  hear  a  second  time,  if  I  can  help  it,  a  preacher 
who  has  teased  me  to  do  right.  I  used  to  hope  at  first  that 
perhaps  a  clergyman  who  was  teasing  people  might  incidentally 
slip  off  the  track  a  minute,  and  say  something  or  see  something 
interesting  and  alive.  But,  apparently,  preachers  who  do  not 
see  that  people  should  not  be  teased  to  do  right,  do  not  see  other 
things,  and  I  have  gradually  given  up  having  hopeful  moments 


ON  BEING  IMPROVED  BY  OTHER  PEOPLE    119 

about  them.  Why,  in  a  world  like  this,  with  the  right  and  the 
wrong  in  it  all  lying  so  eloquent  and  plain  and  beautiful  in  the 
lives  of  the  people  about  us,  and  just  waiting  to  be  uncovered 
a  little,  waiting  to  be  looked  at  hard  a  minute,  should  audiences 
be  gathered  together  and  teased  to  do  right? 

If  the  right  were  merely  to  be  had  in  sermons  or  on  paper, 
it  might  be  different.  My  own  experience  with  the  right  has 
been,  if  I  may  speak  for  one,  that  when  I  get  out  of  the  way 
of  the  people  who  are  doing  it,  and  let  the  right  they  are  doing 
be  seen  by  people,  everybody  wants  it.  When  people  who  are 
doing  right  are  quietly  revealed,  uncovered  a  little  further  by 
a  preacher,  everybody  envies  them,  and  teasing  becomes 
superfluous.  People  sit  in  their  seats  and  think  of  them,  and 
become  covetous  to  be  like  them.  If,  this  very  day,  all  the 
ministers  of  the  world  were  to  agree  that,  on  next  Sunday 
morning  at  half-past  ten  o'clock,  they  all  with  one  accord 
would  preach  a  sermon  teasing  people  to  be  rich,  it  would  not 
be  more  absurd,  or  more  pathetic,  or  more  away  from  the  point, 
than  it  would  be  to  preach  a  sermon  teasing  people  to  be  good. 
They  want  to  be  good  now;  they  envy  the  people  that  they  see 
going  about  the  world  not  leaning  on  others  to  be  good  — 
self-poised,  independent,  free,  rich,  spiritually  self-supporting 
persons. 

The  men  and  women  that  we  know  may  be  more  or  less 
muddled  in  their  minds  with  philosophy  or  with  theology,  or 
perhaps  they  are  being  deceived  by  expediency  or  being  bullied 
by  their  environment,  but  they  are  not  wicked;  they  are  out  of 
focus,  and  what  they  desire  when  they  go  to  church  on  Sunday 
morning  is  to  get  a  good  look  at  beautiful  and  refreshing  things 
that  they  want,  and  for  an  hour  and  a  half,  if  possible,  with  slow 
steadied  thought  see  their  own  lives  in  perspective.  It  is  a 
criminal  waste  of  time  to  get  hundreds  of  people  to  come  into 
church  on  a  Sunday  morning  and  seat  them  all  together  in  a 
great  room  where  they  cannot  get  out,  and  then  tease  them 
and  tell  them  they  ought  to  be  good.     They  knew  it  before 


120  CROWDS 

they  came.  They  are  already  agreed,  all  of  them,  that  they 
want  to  be  good.  They  even  want  to  be  good  in  business  — 
as  good  as  they  can  afford  to.  The  question  is  how  to  manage 
to  do  it.  The  thing  that  is  troubling  them  is  the  technique. 
How  can  they  be  good  in  their  business  —  more  good  than  their 
employers  want'  them  to  be,  for  instance  —  and  keep  their 
positions.'*  Doing  as  one  would  wish  one  had  done  afterward, 
or  knowing  what  one  is  about,  or  "being  good"  as  it  is  some- 
times called,  is  a  thing  that  all  really  clever  people  have  agreed 
upon.  They  simply  cannot  manage  some  of  the  details  —  details 
like  time  and  place,  a  detail  like  being  good  now,  for  instance, 
or  like  being  good  here.  It  is  the  more  practical  things 
like  these  that  trouble  people,  or  they  grow  mixed  in  their 
thoughts  about  the  big  goods  and  the  little  ones  —  which 
shall  be  first  in  order  of  importance  or  which  in  the  order  of 
time.  And  when  one  sees  that  people  are  really  like  this  in 
their  hearts,  and  when  one  sees  them,  all  these  poor,  helpless 
people,  sitting  cooped  up  in  a  church  for  an  hour  and  a  half 
being  teased  to  be  good,  it  is  small  wonder  that  it  seems,  or  is 
coming  to  seem,  to  the  clean-cut  morally  businesslike  men  and 
women  we  have  to-day,  a  pitiful  waste  of  time. 


I  come  to  the  second  class  of  preachers  I  had  in  mind  with 
more  diffidence.  My  feelings  about  them  are  not  so  simple 
and  rudimentary  as  my  feelings  about  those  who  have  teased 
me  to  be  good. 

Any  man  who  travels  about,  or  who  drops  into  churches 
wherever  he  happens  to  be  from  Sunday  to  Sunday,  is  almost  sure 
to  find  in  every  city  of  considerable  size  at  least  one  imperious 
capable  baffling  clergyman.  If  one  is  strictly  honest  and  fair 
toward  him,  to  say  nothing  of  being  a  well-meant  and  hopeful 
human  being  who  is  living  in  the  same  world  with  him  and  who 
feels  very  imperfect  too,  finding  any  serious  and  honest  fault  with 
the  sermon,  or  at  least  laying  one's  finger  upon  what  the  fault 


ON  BEING  IMPROVED  BY  OTHER  PEOPLE    121 

is,  seems  to  be  almost  impossible.  One  simply  comes  out  of 
the  church  in  a  nice,  neat  little  glow  of  good-will  and  admiration, 
and  with  a  strange,  soothing,  happy  sense  of  new,  fresh,  con- 
venient wisdom. 

The  only  fair  way  to  criticise  the  preacher  who  belongs  in 
this  class  seems  to  be  to  take  ten  years  for  it,  go  in  regularly 
and  get  a  httle  practice  every  Sunday.  There  are  preachers 
who  preach  so  well  that  the  only  way  one  can  ever  find  what  is 
the  matter  with  their  sermons  is  to  sit  quietly  while  they  are 
preaching  them,  and  look  around  at  the  people.  One  thinks 
as  one  looks  around,  "These  people  are  what  this  man  has  done." 

They  are  the  same  people  they  were  ten  years  ago. 

I  often  hear  other  sermons  that  are  far  easier  to  criticise. 
They  are  one-sided  or  narrow,  but  they  make  new  people. 

I  might  not  always  like  to  be  in  a  congregation  when  a  man 
is  preaching  a  sermon  that  makes  new  people,  because  he  may 
be  making  people  or  kinds  of  people  that  at  the  time  at  least 
I  do  not  need  to  be.  But  I  naturally  prefer,  at  least  part  of 
the  time,  a  preacher  who  puts  in,  before  he  is  through,  some 

good  work  on  me.     There  is  a  preacher  in  B who  always 

arouses  in  me,  whenever  I  am  in  the  city,  the  same  old,  curious, 
hopeful  feeling  about  him  that  this  next  one  more  time  he  is 
going  to  get  to  me,  that  I  am  going  to  be  attended  to.  I  cannot 
say  how  many  times  I  have  dropped  in  upon  him  in  his  big 
plain  church,  seen  him  with  his  hushed  congregation  all  about 
him,  all  listening  to  him  up  to  the  last  minute,  each  of  them 
sitting  all  alone  with  his  own  soul,  and  with  him,  and  with  the 
ticking  of  the  clock.  And  the  sermon  is  always  about  the  same. 
You  see  him  narrowing  the  truth  down  wonderfully,  ruthlessly, 
to  You.  You  begin  to  see  everything  —  to  see  all  the  argu- 
ments, all  the  circumstances,  all  the  principles.  You  see  them 
narrowing  you  down  grimly,  closing  in  upon  you,  converging 
you  and  all  your  little,  mean  life,  driving  you  apparently  at  last 
into  one  helpless  beautiful  corner  of  doing  right.  You  feel  while 
you  listen  the  old  sermon-thrill  you  have  felt  before,  a  kind  of 


122  CROWDS 

intellectual  joy  in  God,  in  the  very  brains  of  God;  you  think 
of  how  He  has  arranged  right  and  wrong  so  cunningly,  laid  them 
all  out  so  plain  and  so  close  beside  each  other  for  you  to  choose 
to  be  good.  Then  the  benediction  is  pronounced  over  you, 
the  sevenfold  amen  dies  away  over  you,, and  you  go  home  and 
do  as  you  like. 

One  sees  the  sermon  for  days  afterward  lying  out  there  in 
calm  and  orderly  memory,  all  so  complete  and  perfect  by 
itself.  There  does  not  really  seem  to  be  any  need  of  doing 
anything  more  to  it.  It  is  what  people  mean  probably  by 
a  "finished  sermon."  It  is  as  if  goodness  had  been  put  under 
a  glass  globe  in  a  parlour.  You  go  home  proud  to  think  of  it, 
and  proud  of  course  to  have  such  a  sermon  by  you.  But  you 
would  never  think  of  touching  such  a  complete  and  perfect 
thing  during  the  week  the  way  you  would  a  poorer  sermon, 
disturbing  it  hopefully  or  mussing  it  over,  trying  to  work  some 
of  it  into  your  own  life. 


So  much  for  the  first  two  types  of  preachers :  the  preachers 
who  stand  before  us  Sunday  morning  with  goodness  placed  be- 
side them  in  a  dense  darkness  while  they  talk,  and  who  tease  us 
to  look  at  it  in  the  darkness  and  to  take  some;  and  those  who 
stand,  a  cold  white  light  all  about  them,  and  use  pointers  and 
blackboards  and  things — maps  of  goodness,  great  charts  of  what 
people  ought  to  be  like  —  and  who  makef  one  see  each  virtue 
just  where  it  belongs  as  a  kind  of  dot,  like  cities  in  a  geography, 
and  who  leave  us  with  the  pleasant  feeling  of  how  sweet  and 
reasonable  God  is,  or  rather  would  be  if  anybody  would  pay 
any  attention  to  Him. 


I  have  already  hinted  at  the  qualities  of  the  third  class  of 
preachers — those  who  make  me  want  to  be  good.  They  seem  to 
throw  goodness  as  upon  a  screen,  some  vast  screen  of  the  world. 


ON  BEING  IMPROVED  BY  OTHER  PEOPLE    123 

of  this  real  world  about  me.  They  turn  their  souls,  like  still 
stereopticons,  upon  the  faces  of  men  —  men  who  are  like  the 
men  and  women  I  know.  I  go  about  afterward  all  the  week 
seeing  their  sermons  in  the  street.  Everybody  I  see,  every- 
thing that  comes  up  Monday,  Tuesday,  Wednesday,  the  very 
patterns  of  the  days  and  nights,  of  my  duties  and  failures,  keep 
coming  up,  reminding  me  to  be  good.  I  may  start  in  — ^  I  often 
do  —  with  such  a  preacher,  criticising  him,  but  he  soon  gets 
me  so  occupied  criticising  myself  and  so  lost  in  wondering  how 
this  something  that  he  has  and  sees  just  beyond  us,  just  beyond 
him,  just  beyond  me,  can  be  had  for  other  people,  and  how  I 
can  have  some  of  it  for  myself,  that  I  forget  to  criticise.  He 
searches  my  soul,  makes  me  a  new  being  in  my  presence  before 
my  eyes  —  that  is,  a  new  being  toward  some  one  subject,  or 
some  one  possibility  in  the  world.  He  helps  me  while  in  his 
presence  to  accomplish  the  supreme  thing  that  one  man  can 
ever  do  for  another.  He  helps  me  to  get  my  own  attention. 
He  makes  me  see  a  set  of  particular  things  that  I  immediately, 
before  his  next  sentence,  am  trying  to  find  means  to  do.  He 
does  not  attract  my  attention  toward  what  he  wants,  like  a 
preacher  who  teases;  nor  does  he  attract  my  attention  to  what 
God  wants,  like  the  preacher  with  the  charts  of  goodness.  He 
succeeds  in  attracting  and  holding  down  my  attention  to  what 
I  really  want  for  myself  or  others,  and  to  what  I  propose  to  get. 
The  imagination  of  crowds  is  convinced  only  by  men  who 
have  real  genius  for  expression,  for  making  word-pictures  of 
real  things,  men  who  have  what  might  be  called  moving- 
picture  minds,  and  who  are  so  picturesque  and  vivid  that 
when  they  talk  to  people  about  goodness  they  have  seen, 
everybody  feels  as  if  they  had  been  there.  It  has  to  be  admitted 
that  this  type  of  preacher,  who  has  a  kind  of  genius,  and  has 
developed  an  art  form  for  expressing  goodness  in  words,  is 
necessarily  an  exceptional  man.  And  it  is  unreasonable  and 
imfair  in  the  public  to  expect  a  man  to  get  up  in  the  pulpit  and, 
with  no  costume  and  no  accessories,  merely  with  a  kind  of 


124  CROWDS 

shrewd  holiness  or  divination  into  human  nature,  present  good- 
ness so  that  we  seem  to  be  there.  It  is  small  wonder  that  a 
man  who  finds  he  is  expected  to  be  a  kind  of  combination  of  bio- 
graph,  brother,  spiritual  detective,  and  angel  all  in  one,  in  order 
to  do  his  work  successfully  has  days  of  feeling  that  he  has 
joined  the  ranks  of  The  Impossible  Profession. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
MAKING  GOODNESS  HURRY 

PERHAPS  it  has  leaked  out  to  those  who  have  been  following 
these  pages  thus  far,  that  I  am  merely  at  best,  if  the  truth  were 
known,  a  kind  of  reformed  preacher. 

I  admit  it.  Many  other  people  are.  We  began,  owing  to 
circumstances,  with  the  idea  of  getting  people  to  take  up  good- 
ness by  talking  about  it. 

But  we  have  grown  discouraged  in  talking  to  people  about 
goodness.  More  and  more,  year  by  year,  we  have  made  up 
our  minds,  as  I  have  hinted,  to  lie  low  and  to  keep  still  and 
show  them  some. 

And  I  can  only  say  it  again,  as  I  have  said  it  before,  if  every- 
body in  the  world  could  know  my  plumber  or  pay  a  bill  to  him, 
the  world  would  soon  begin,  slowly  but  surely,  to  be  a  very 
different  place. 

The  first  time  I  saw  B 1  had  asked  him  to  come  over 

to  arrange  with  regard  to  putting  in  new  waterpipes  from  the 
street  to  my  house.  The  old  ones  had  been  put  in  no  one  could 
remember  how  many  years  before,  and  the  pressure  of  water 
in  the  house,  apparently  from  rust  in  the  pipes,  had  become 
very  weak.     After  a  minute's  conversation  I  at  once  engaged 

B to  put  in  the  new  and  larger  pipes,  and  he  agreed  to 

dig  open  the  trench  (about  two  hundred  feet  long,  and  three 
feet  deep)  and  put  the  pipes  in  the  next  day  for  thirty-five 
dollars.  The  next  morning  he  appeared  as  promised,  but, 
instead  of  going  to  work,  he  came  into  my  study,  stood  there  a 
moment  before  my  eyes,  and  quietly  but  firmly  threw  himself 
out  of  his  job ! 

1S6 


126  CROWDS 

There  was  no  use  in  spending  thirty-five  dollars,  he  said. 
He  had  gone  to  the  City  Water  Works  OflBce  and  told  them  to 
look  into  the  matter  and  see  if  the  connection  they  had  put 
in  at  the  junction  of  my  pipe  with  the  main  in  the  street  did  not 
need  attention.  They  had  found  that  a  new  connection  was 
necessary.  They  would  see  that  a  new  one  was  put  in  at  once. 
They  were  obliged  to  do  it  for  nothing,  he  said;  and  then, 
sUpping  (figuratively  speaking)  thirty-five  dollars  into  my 
pocket,  he  bowed  gravely  and  was  gone. 

B knew  absolutely  and  conclusively  (as  any  one  would 

with  a  look)  that  I  was  not  the  sort  of  person  who  would  ever 
have  heard  of  that  blessed  little  joint  out  in  the  street,  or  who 
ever  would  hear  of  it  —  or  who  would  know  what  to  do  with  it 
if  he  did. 


Sometimes  I  sit  and  think  of  B in  church,  or  at  least 

I  used  to,  especially  when  his  bill  had  just  come  in.     It  was 

always  a  pleasure  to  think  of  paying  one  of  B 's  bills  — 

even  if  it  was  sometimes  a  postponed  one.     You  always  knew, 

with  B ,  that  he  had  made  that  bill  out  to  you  as  if  he  had 

been  making  out  a  bill  to  himself. 

Not  such  a  bad  thing  to  think  about  during  a  sermon. 

I  do  not  deny  that  I  do  lose  a  sentence  now  and  then  in  ser- 
mons; and  while,  as  every  one  knows,  the  sermons  I  have  been 
provided  with  in  the  old  stone  church  have  been  of  a  rare  and 
high  order,  there  have,  I  do  acknowledge,  been  bad  moments  — 
little  sudden  bare  spots  or  streaks  of  abstraction  —  and  I  do 
not  deny  that  there  have  been  times  when  I  could  not  help 
feeling,  as  I  sat  listening,  like  sending  around  Monday  morning 
to  the  parsonage  —  my  plumber.     One  could  not  help  thinking 

what  Dr. if  he  once  got  started  on  a  plumber  like  B 

(had  had  him  around  working  all  the  week  during  a  sermon) 
could  do  with  him. 

I  have  a  shoemaker,  too,  who  would  help  most  ministers. 


MAKING  GOODNESS  HURRY  127 

I  imagine  he  would  point  up  their  sermons  a  good  deal  —  if 
they  had  his  shoes  on. 

Perhaps  shoes  and  pipes  and  things  like  these  will  be  looked 
upon  soon  to-day  as  constituting  the  great,  slow,  modest,  im- 
placable spiritual  forces  of  our  time. 

At  all  events,  this  is  the  most  economical,  sensible,  thorough 
way  (when  one  thinks  of  it)  that  goodness  can  be  advertised. 


CHAPTER  IX 
TOUCHING  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS 

A  MAN'S  success  in  business  to-day  turns  upon  his  power  of 
getting  people  to  believe  he  has  something  that  they  want. 

Success  in  business,  in  the  last  analysis,  turns  upon  touching 
the  imagination  of  crowds.  The  reason  that  preachers  in  this 
present  generation  are  less  successful  in  getting  people  to  want 
goodness  than  business  men  are  in  getting  them  to  want  motor- 
cars, hats,  and  pianolas,  is  that  business  men  as  a  class  are  more 
close  and  desperate  students  of  human  nature,  and  have  boned 
down  harder  to  the  art  of  touching  the  imaginations  of  crowds. 

When  one  considers  what  it  is  that  touches  a  crowd's  imagina- 
tion and  how  it  does  it,  one  is  bound  is  admit  that  there  is  not  a 
city  anywhere  which  has  not  hundreds  of  men  in  it  who  could 
do  more  to  touch  the  imagination  of  crowds  with  goodness 
than  any  clergyman  could.  A  man  of  very  great  gifts  in  the 
pulpit,  a  man  of  genius,  even  an  immortal  clergyman,  could  be 
outwitted  in  the  art  of  touching  the  imagination  of  crowds  with 
goodness  by  a  comparatively  ordinary  man  in  any  one  of  several 
hundred  of  our  modern  business  occupations. 

There  is  a  certain  nation  I  have  in  mind  as  I  write,  which  I  do 
not  like  to  call  by  name,  because  it  is  struggling  with  its  faults 
as  the  rest  of  us  are  with  ours.  But  I  do  not  think  it  would  be 
too  much  to  say  that  this  particular  nation  I  have  in  mind  — 
and  I  leave  the  reader  to  fill  in  one  for  himself,  has  been  deter- 
mined in  its  national  character  for  hundreds  of  years,  and  is 
being  determined  to-day  —  every  day,  nearly  every  minute  of 
every  day,  except  when  all  the  people  are  asleep  —  by  a  certain 
personal  habit  that  the  people  have.     I  am  persuaded  that  this 

128 


TOUCHING  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS  129 

habit  of  itself  alone  would  have  been  enough  to  determine  the 
fate  of  the  nation  as  a  third-rate  power,  that  it  would  have  made 
it  always  do  things  with  small  puUings  and  haulings,  in  short 
breaths,  and  hand-to-mouth  insights  —  a  little  jerk  of  idealism 
one  day,  and  a  little  jerk  of  materialism  the  next  —  a  kind  of 
national  palavering,  and  see-sawing  and  gesturing,  and  talking 
excitedly  and  with  little  flourishes.  It  is  a  nation  that  is  always 
shrugging  its  shoulders,  that  almost  never  seems  to  be  capable 
of  doing  a  thing  with  fine  directness,  with  long  rhythms  of  pur- 
pose or  sustained  feeling;  and  all  because  every  man,  woman, 
and  child  in  the  country  —  scores  of  generations  of  them  for 
hundreds  of  years  —  has  been  taught  that  the  great  spiritual 
truth  or  principle  at  the  bottom  of  correctly  and  beautifully 
buying  a  turnip  is  to  begin  by  saying  that  you  do  not  want  a 
turnip  at  all,  that  you  never  eat  turnips,  and  none  of  your 
family,  and  that  they  never  would.  The  other  man  begins  by 
pointing  out  that  he  is  never  going  to  sell  another  turnip  as 
long  as  he  lives,  if  he  can  help  it.  Gradually  the  facts  are  allowed 
to  edge  in  until  at  last,  and  when  each  man  has  taken  off  God 
knows  how  much  from  the  value  of  his  soul,  and  spent  two 
shillings'  worth  of  time  on  keeping  a  halfpenny  in  his  pocket, 
both  parties  separate  courteously,  only  to  carry  out  the  same 
spiritual  truth  on  a  radish  perhaps  or  a  spool  of  thread,  or  it 
may  be  even  a  house  and  lot,  or  a  battleship,  or  a  war,  or  a 
rumour  of  a  war,  with  somebody. 

The  United  States,  speaking  broadly,  is  not  Hke  this.  But 
it  might  have  been. 

In  the  United  States  some  forty  years  ago,  being  a  new 
country,  and  being  a  country  where  everything  a  man  did  was 
in  the  nature  of  things,  felt  to  be  a  first  experiment,  everybody 
felt  democratic  and  independent,  and  as  if  he  were  making  the 
laws  of  the  universe  just  for  himself  as  he  went  along. 

There  was  a  period  of  ten  years  or  so  in  which  every  spool  of 
thread  and  bit  of  dress  goods  —  everything  that  people  wore 
on  their  bodies  or  put  in  their  mouths,  and  everything  that 


130  CROWDS 

they  read,  came  up  and  had  to  be  considered  as  an  original  first 
proposition,  as  if  there  never  had  been  a  spool  of  thread  before, 
as  if  each  bit  of  dress  goods  was,  or  was  capable  of  being,  a  new 
fresh  experiment,  with  an  adventurous  price  on  it;  and  before 
we  knew  it  a  moral  nagging  and  edging  and  hitching  had  set 
in,  and  was  fast  becoming  in  America  an  American  trait,  and 
fixing  itself  by  daily  repetition  upon  the  imagination  of  the 
people. 

The  shopping  of  a  country  is,  on  the  whole,  from  a  psycholo- 
gist's point  of  view,  the  most  spiritual  energy,  the  most  irrevo- 
cable, most  implacable  meter  there  can  ever  be  of  the  religion 
a  country  really  has. 

There  was  no  clergyman  in  America  who  could  have  made  the 
slightest  impression  on  this  great  national  list  or  trend  of  always 
getting  things  for  less  than  they  were  worth  —  this  rut  of  never 
doing  as  one  would  be  done  by.  What  was  there  that  could 
be  done  with  an  obstinate,  pervasive,  unceasing  habit  of  the 
people  like  this.'* 

What  was  there  that  could  be  done  to  touch  the  imagination 
of  the  crowd  .f* 

Six  thousand  women  a  day  were  going  in  and  out  of  A.  T. 
Stewart's  great  store  on  Broadway  at  that  time.  A.  T.  Stewart 
announced  to  New  York  suddenly  in  huge  letters  one  day,  that 
from  that  day  forward  there  would  be  one  price  for  everything 
sold  in  his  store,  and  that  that  price  would  be  paid  for  it  by 
everybody. 

A.  T.  Stewart's  store  was  the  largest,  most  successful, 
original,  and  most  closely  watched  store  in  America. 

The  six  thousand  women  became  one  thousand. 

Then  two  thousand.  Some  of  them  had  found  that  they 
finished  their  shopping  sooner;  the  better  class  of  women,  those 
whose  time  was  worth  the  most,  and  whose  custom  was  the 
largest,  gradually  found  they  did  not  want  to  shop  anywhere^ 
else.  The  two  thousand  became  three  thousand,  four  thousand, 
six  thousand,  ten  thousand,  twelve  thousand. 


TOUCHmG  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS  131 

Other  department  stores  wanted  the  twelve  thousand  to 
come  to  them.     They  announced  the  one  price. 

Hardware  stores  did  it.  Groceries  announced  one  price. 
Then  everybody. 

Not  all  the  clergymen  in  America,  preaching  every  Sun- 
day for  months,  could  have  done  very  much  in  the  way  of 
seriously  touching  the  imagination  of  the  crowd  on  the  moral 
unworthiness,  the  intellectual  degradation,  the  national  danger 
of  picking  out  the  one  thing  that  nearly  all  the  people  all  do, 
and  had  to  do,  all  day,  every  day,  and  making  that  thing  mean, 
incompetent,  and  small.  No  one  had  thought  out  what  it  would 
lead  to,  and  how  monstrous  and  absurd  it  was  and  would  always 
be  to  have  a  nation  have  all  its  people  taking  every  little  thing 
all  day,  every  day,  that  they  were  buying,  or  that  they 
were  selling  —  taking  a  spool  of  thread,  for  instance  —  and 
packing  it,  or  packing  their  action  with  it,  as  full  of  adulterated 
motives  and  of  fresh  and  original  ways  of  not  doing  as  they 
would  be  done  by  as  they  could  think  up  —  a  little  innocent 
spool  of  thread  —  wreaking  all  their  sins  and  kinds  of  sins  on  it, 
breaking  every  one  of  the  ten  commandments  on  it  as  an 
oflFering     .     .     . 

It  was  A.  T.  Stewart,  a  very  ordinary-looking,  practical  man 
in  a  plain,  everyday  business,  who  arrested  the  attention  of  a 
nation  and  changed  the  habit  of  thought  and  trend  of  mind 
of  a  great  people,  and  made  them  a  candid,  direct  people,  a 
people  that  went  with  great  sunny  prairies  and  high  mountains, 
a  yea  and  nay  people,  straightforward,  and  free  from  palavering 
forever.  A.  T.  Stewart  was  accustomed,  in  his  own  personal 
dealings  from  day  to  day,  to  cut  people  short  when  they  tried  to 
haggle  with  him.  He  liked  to  take  things  for  granted,  drive 
through  to  the  point,  and  go  on  to  the  next  one.  This  might 
have  ended,  of  course,  in  a  kind  of  cul  de  sac  of  being  a  merely 
personal  trait  in  a  clean-cut,  manful,  straightforward  American 
gentleman;  and  if  Stewart  had  been  a  snob  or  a  Puritan,  or  had 
felt  superior,  or  if  he  had  thought  other  people  —  the  great 


132  CROWDS 

crowds  of  them  who  flocked  through  his  store  —  could  never 
expect  to  be  as  good  as  he  was,  nothing  would  ever  have  come 
of  it. 

It  is  not  likely  that  he  was  conscious  of  the  long  train  of 
spiritual  results  he  had  set  in  motion;  of  the  way  he  had  taken 
the  habit  of  mind,  the  daily,  hourly  psychology  of  a  great  people, 
and  had  wrought  it  through  with  his  own  spirit;  or  of  the  way 
he  had  saved  up,  and  set  where  it  could  be  used,  everyday 
religion  in  America,  and  had  freed  the  business  genius  of  a 
nation  for  its  most  characteristic  and  most  effective  self- 
expression. 

He  merely  was  conscious  that  he  could  not  endure  palavering 
in  doing  business  himself,  and  that  he  would  not  submit  to  being 
obliged  to  endure  it,  and  he  believed  millions  of  people  in 
America  were  as  clean-cut  and  straightforward  as  he  was. 

And  the  millions  of  people  stood  by  him. 

Perhaps  A.  T.  Stewart  touched  the  imagination  of  the  crowd 
because  he  had  let  the  crowd  touch  his  and  had  seen  what 
crowds,  in  spite  of  appearances,  were  really  like. 

The  enterprise  of  touching  the  imagination  of  the  crowd  with 
goodness,  which  is  being  conducted  every  day  on  an  enormous 
scale  around  us,  has  to  be  carried  on,  like  all  huge  enterprises, 
by  men  who  are  in  a  large  degree  unconscious  of  it.  There  are 
few  department  stores  in  England  or  America  that  would 
expect  to  be  called  pious,  but  if  one  is  deeply  and  obstinately 
interested  in  the  Golden  Rule,  and  in  getting  crowds  of  people 
to  believe  in  it  at  a  time,  it  is  impossible  not  to  think  what 
sweeps  of  opportunity  department  stores  would  have  with 
it  —  with  the  Golden  Rule.  With  thousands  of  people  flowing 
in  and  out  all  the  week,  and  with  hundreds  of  clerks  to  attend 
to  it,  eight  hours  a  day,  there  would  hardly  seem  to  be  any  limit 
to  what  such  a  store  could  do  in  making  the  Golden  Rule  a 
direct,  a  pointed  and  personal  thing,  a  thing  that  could  not  be 
evaded  and  could  not  be  forgotten  by  thousands  of  people. 
The  same  people  all  going  in  and  out  of  department  stores,  vast 


TOUCHING  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS  133 

congregations  of  them,  eight  hours  a  day,  which  ministers  can 
only  get  at  in  small  lots,  three  hundred  or  so,  twenty  minutes 
a  week,  and  can  only  get  at  with  words  even  then  —  all  of  them 
being  convinced  in  terms  they  understand,  and  in  terms  they 
keenly  feel,  convinced  in  hats  that  they  will  see  over  and  over 
again,  convinced  in  velvets  that  they  are  going  to  put  on  and 
off  for  years,  in  laces,  in  waistcoats,  shoes,  in  dining-room  chairs, 
convinced  in  the  very  underclothes  next  to  their  skins,  the 
clothes  they  sleep  in  all  night,  in  the  very  plates  on  which  they 
eat,  while  all  the  time  they  keep  remembering,  or  being  re- 
minded, just  how  the  things  were  bought,  and  just  what  was 
claimed  for  them  and  what  was  not  claimed  for  them,  and  think- 
ing how  the  claims  came  true  or  how  they  did  not. 


I  just  saw  lying  on  the  table  as  I  came  through  the  hall  a 
moment  ago  a  hat  which  (out  of  all  the  long  rows  of  hats  I  can 
see  faintly  reaching  across  the  years)  will  always  be  to  me  a 
memorable  hat.  I  am  free  to  say  that,  after  all  the  ladies  it 
has  been  taken  off  to,  my  great  memory  of  that  hat  is  now  and 
always  will  be,  as  long  as  I  live,  the  department  store  at  which 
I  bought  it,  and  the  things  the  department  store,  before  I  got 
through  with  it,  managed  to  make  the  hat  say. 

I  had  been  in  the  store  the  day  before  and  selected,  in  broad 
daylight,  with  a  big  mirror  staring  me  out  of  countenance,  a  hat 
which  was  a  quarter  of  a  size  too  large.  To  clinch  the  matter, 
I  had  ordered  four  ventilating  holes  to  be  punched  in  it,  and 
had  it  sent  to  my  rooms  to  be  my  hat  —  implacably  my  hat  as 
I  supposed,  for  better  for  worse,  for  richer  for  poorer  —  always. 
The  next  morning,  after  standing  before  a  mirror  and  trying 
hopefully  for  a  few  minutes  to  see  if  I  could  not  look  more 
intelligent  in  the  hat,  I  returned  to  the  store  firmly.  I  had 
made  up  my  mind  that  I  would  keep  from  looking  the  way  that 
that  hat  made  me  look,  at  any  cost.  The  store  was  not 
responsible  according  to  the  letter  either  for  the  hat  or  for  the 


134  CROWDS 

way  I  looked  in  it.  I  had  deliberately  chosen  it,  looked  at  my- 
self in  cold  blood  in  it,  had  those  dreadful,  irremovable,  eternal 
air-holes  dug  into  it,  I  would  buy  a  new  one.  I  jumped  into 
a  cab,  and  a  moment  after  I  arrived  I  found  myself  before  the 
clerk  from  whom  I  had  bought  it,  with  a  new  one  on  my  head, 
and  was  just  reaching  into  my  pocket  for  my  purse  when,  to  my 
astonishment,  I  heard,  or  seemed  to  hear,  the  great  Department 
Store  Itself,  in  the  gentle  accents  of  a  young  man  with  a  yellow 
moustache,  saying:  "I'm  sorry"  —  all  seven  storys  of  it 
gathering  itself  up  softly,  apparently,  and  saying  "I'm  sorry!" 
The  young  man  explained  that  he  was  afraid  the  hat  was  wrong 
the  day  before,  and  thought  he  ought  to  have  told  me  so,  that 
the  store  would  not  want  me  to  pay  for  the  mistake. 

I  came  home  a  changed  man.  I  had  been  hit  by  the  Golden 
Rule  before  in  department  stores,  but  always  rather  subtly  — 
never  with  such  a  broad,  beautiful  flourish!  I  made  some 
faint  acknowledgment,  I  have  forgotten  what,  and  rushed  out 
of  the  store. 

But  I  have  never  gone  past  the  store  since,  on  a  'bus,  or  in 
a  taxi,  or  sliding  through  the  walkers  on  the  street,  but  I  have 
looked  up  to  it  —  to  its  big,  quiet  windows,  its  broad,  honest 
pillars  fronting  a  world. 

I  take  off  my  hat  to  it. 

But  it  gave  me  more  than  a  hat. 

I  think  what  a  thousand  department  stores,  stationed  in  a 
thousand  places  on  this  old  planet,  could  do  in  touching  the 
imagination  of  the  world  —  every  day,  day  by  day,  cityfuls 
at  a  time. 

I  had  found  a  department  store  that  had  absolutely  identified 
itself  with  my  interests,  that  could  act  about  a  hat  the  way  a 
wife  would  —  a  department  store  that  looked  forward  to  a 
permanent  relation  with  me  —  a  great  live  machine  that  could 
be  glad  and  sorry  —  that  really  took  me  in,  knew  how  I  felt 
about  things,  cared  how  I  looked  as  I  walked  down  the  street. 
Sometimes  I  think  of  the  poor,  wounded,  useless  thing  I  took 


TOUCHING  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS  135 

back  to  them,  those  pitiless  holes  punched  in  it  —  just  where  no 
one  else  would  ever  have  had  them,  I  am  human.  I  always  feel 
about  the  store,  that  great  marble  and  glass  Face,  when  I  go  by 
it  now  as  if,  in  spite  of  all  the  difficulties,  it  wanted  me  —  to  be 
beautiful!  I  at  least  feel  and  know  that  the  people  who  were 
the  brain,  the  daily  moving  consciousness  behind  the  face  — 
wanted  me  to  be  a  becoming  customer  to  them.  They  did  not 
want  to  see  me  coming  in,  if  it  could  possibly  be  helped,  in  that 
hat  any  more ! 


I  have  told  this  little  history  of  a  gray  hat,  not  because 
it  is  in  any  way  extraordinary,  but  because  it  is  not.  The 
thing  same,  or  something  quite  like  it,  expressing  the  same 
spirit,  might  have  happened  in  any  one  of  the  best  hundred 
department  stores  in  the  world. 

Most  people  can  remember  a  time,  only  a  very  little  while 
ago,  when  clerks  in  our  huge  department  stores  or  selling 
machines  were  not  expected  to  be  people  who  would  think  of 
things  like  this  to  do,  or  who  would  know  how,  or  who  would 
think  to  consider  them  good  business  if  they  did. 

The  department  store  that  based  its  success  on  selecting 
clerks  of  a  high  order  of  human  insight,  that  paid  higher  wages  to 
its  clerks  for  their  power  of  being  believed  in,  for  their  personal 
qualities  and  their  shrewdness  in  helping  people  and  a  gift  for 
discovering  mutual  interests  with  everybody  and  for  founding 
permanent  human  relations  with  the  public,  had  not  been 
thought  of  a  little  while  ago. 

All  that  had  been  thought  of  was  the  appearance  of  these 
things.  It  was  an  employer's  business,  speaking  generally, 
to  get  all  he  could  out  of  his  clerks  and  have  them  get  as  little 
as  possible  out  of  him.  It  was  their  business  in  their  turn  to 
get  as  much  money  out  of  the  public  as  they  could  get,  and  to 
give  the  public  as  little  in  return  as  they  dared. 

The  type  of  employer  who  liked  to  do  business  in  this  way. 


136  CROWDS 

and  who  believed  in  it,  crowed  over  the  world  nearly  every- 
where as  the  Practical  Man.  And  for  the  time  being  certainly 
it  has  to  be  admitted  that  he  seemed-  the  most  successful. 
Naturally  there  came  to  be  a  general  impression  among  the 
people  that  only  certain  lower  orders  of  life  and  character  could 
be  employed,  or  could  stand  being  employed,  in  the  great 
department  stores. 

I  used  often  to  go  into 's.     Everybody  remembers  it. 

I  went  in,  as  a  rule,  in  a  helpless,  waiting,  married  way,  and  as 
a  mere  attache  of  the  truly  wise  and  good.  All  I  ever  did  or 
was  expected  to  do  was  to  stand  by  and  look  wise  and  discrim- 
inating a  minute  about  dress  goods,  when  spoken  to.  I  used 
to  put  in  my  time  looking  behind  the  counters  —  all  those  busy, 
pale,  yellow-lighted  people  in  little  holes  or  stalls  trying  to  be 
human  and  natural  in  that  long,  low,  indoor  street  of  theirs, 
crowds  of  women  staring  by  them  and  picking  at  things. 
Always  that  moving  sidewalk  of  questions  —  that  dull,  eager 
stream  of  consciousness  sweeping  by.  No  sunlight  —  just  the 
crowds  of  covetousness  and  shrewdness.  I  used  to  wonder 
about  the  clerks,  many  of  them,  and  what  they  would  be  like 
at  home  or  under  an  apple  tree  or  each  with  a  bit  of  blue  sky 
to  go  with  them.  They  used  to  seem  in  those  days,  as  I  looked, 
mostly  poor,  underground  creatures  living  in  a  sort  of  Subway  ■ 
of  Things  in  a  hateful,  hard,  little  world  of  clothes,  each  with 
his  little  study  or  trick  or  knack  of  appearances,  standing  there 
and  selling  people  their  good  looks  day  after  day  at  so  much 
a  yard. 

'l"o-day,  m  a  hundred  cities  one  can  go  into  department  shops 
where  one  would  get,  standing  and  looking  on  idly,  totally 
different  impressions.  There  are  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
young  men  and  women  who  have  made  being  a  clerk  a  new 
thing  in  the  world.  The  public  has  already  had  its  imagination 
touched  by  them,  and  is  beginning  to  deal  with  clerks,  as  a 
class,  on  a  different  level. 

This  has  been  brought  to  pass  because  the  employer  has  been 


TOUCHING  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS  137 

thought  of,  or  has  thought  of  himself,  who  engages  and  pays  for 
in  clerks  the  highest  qualities  in  human  nature  that  he  can  get. 
He  picks  out  and  puts  in  power,  and  persuades  to  be  clerks,  peo- 
ple who  would  have  felt  superior  to  it  in  days  gone  by  —  men 
and  women  who  habitually  depend  for  their  efficiency  in  show- 
ing and  selling  goods  upon  their  more  generous  emotions  and 
insights,  their  imaginations  about  other  people.  They  gather 
in  their  new  customers,  and  keep  up  their  long  lists  of  old  and 
regular  customers,  through  shrewd  visions  of  service  to  people, 
and  through  a  technical  gift  for  making  the  Golden  Rule  work. 

When  one  looks  at  it  practically,  and  from  the  point  of  view  of 
all  the  consequences,  a  bargain  is  the  most  spiritual,  conclusive, 
most  self-revealing  experience  that  people  can  have  together. 
Every  bargain  is  a  cross-section  in  three  tenses  of  a  man.  A 
bargain  tells  everything  about  people  —  who  they  are,  and 
what  they  are  like.  It  also  tells  what  they  are  going  to  be  like 
unless  they  take  pains;  and  it  tells  what  they  are  not  going 
to  be  like  too  sometimes,  and  why. 

The  man  who  comes  nearest  in  modern  life  to  being  a  Pope,  is 
the  man  who  determines  in  what  spirit  and  by  what  method  the 
people  under  him  shall  conduct  his  bargains  and  deal  with  his 

customers. ,  at  the  head  of  his  department  store,  has  a 

parish  behind  his  counters  of  twenty-five  hundred  men  and 
women.  He  is  in  the  business  of  determining  their  religion,  the 
way  they  make  their  religion  work,  eight  hours  a  day,  six  days  a 
week.  He  seems  to  me  to  be  engaged  in  the  most  ceaseless,  most 
penetrating,  most  powerful,  and  most  spiritual  activity  of  the 
world.  He  is  really  getting  at  the  imaginations  of  people  with 
his  idea  of  goodness.  If  he  does  not  work  his  way  through  to  a 
man's  imagination  one  minute  or  one  day,  he  does  the  next. 
If  he  cannot  open  up  a  man's  imagination  with  one  line  of  goods, 
he  does  it  with  another.  If  he  cannot  make  him  see  things,  and 
do  as  he  would  be  done  by,  ^\ath  one  kind  of  customer,  another 
is  moved  in  front  of  him  presently,  and  another,  and  another  — 
the  man's  inner  substance  is  being  attacked  and  changed  nearly 


138  CROWDS 

every  minute  every  day.  There  is  nothing  he  can  do,  or  keep 
from  doing,  in  which  his  employer's  idea  of  goodness  does  not 
surround,  besiege,  or  pursue  him.  Every  officer  of  the  staff, 
every  customer  who  shps  softly  up  to  the  counter  in  front  of 
him  makes  him  think  of  the  Golden  Rule  in  a  new  way  or  in 
some  shading  of  a  new  way  —  confronts  him  with  the  will,  with 
the  expectation,  with  the  religion  of  his  employer. 

In 's  store  (where  I  looked  in  a  moment  yesterday) 

one  thousand  of  the  two  thousand  five  hundred  clerks  are  men. 
If  I  were  a  minister  wondering  nearly  every  day  how  to  work  in 
for  my  religion  a  fair  chance  at  men,  I  should  often  look  wist- 
fully from  over  the  edge  of  my  pulpit,  I  imagine,  to  the  head  of 

's  department  store,  sitting  at  that   quiet,  calm, 

empty  looking  desk  of  his  in  his  httle  office  at  the  top  of  his  big 

building  in Street,  with  nothing  but  those  little  six  or 

seven  buttons  he  softly  puts  this  thumbs  on  connecting  him 
with  a  thousand  men. 

And  he  does  not  even  need  the  buttons.  Every  man  knows 
and  feels,  personally  and  intimately,  what  the  man  at  the  desk 
is  asking  him  to  do  with  a  particular  customer  who  stands 
before  him  at  the  moment.  As  soon  as  the  customer  is  there, 
the  man  at  the  desk  practically  is  there  too.  His  religion 
works  by  wireless,  and  goes  automatically,  and  as  from  a  huge 
stored-up  reservoir,  to  all  that  happens  in  the  place.  He 
makes  regularly  with  his  idea  of  goodness  anywhere  from  twenty 
to  sixty  pastoral  calls  (with  every  sale  they  make)  on  a  thousand 
men  a  day.  He  is  not  dependent,  as  the  ordinary  minister 
often  is,  on  their  dying,  or  on  their  babies,  or  on  their  wives,  for 
a  chance  to  get  at  men  with  his  religion. 

If  I  wanted  to  take  a  spiritual  census  of  modern  civilization 
and  get  at  the  actual  scientific  facts,  what  we  would  have  to 
call,  probably  the  foot-tons  of  religion  in  the  world  to-day,  I 
would  not  look  for  them  in  the  year-books  of  the  churches,  I 
would  get  them  by  going  about  in  the  great  department  stores, 
by  moving  among  the  men  and  women  in  them  day  after  day, 


TOUCHING  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS  139 

and  standing  by  and  looking  on  invisibly.  Like  a  shadow  or  a 
light  I  would  watch  them  registering  their  goodness  daily, 
hourly,  on  their  counters,  over  their  counters,  measuring  out 
their  souls  before  God  in  dress  goods,  shoes,  boas,  hats,  silk, 
and  bread  and  butter! 

This  may  not  be  true  of  the  Orient,  but  it  is  true,  and  getting 
to  be  more  true  every  day,  of  Europe  and  America. 

It  is  especially  true  of  America.  In  the  things  which  we 
borrow  in  America,  we  are  far  behind  the  rest  of  the  world. 
It  is  to  the  things  that  we  create,  that  we  must  look  alone,  for 
our  larger  destiny,  and  our  world-service. 

Naturally,  in  so  far  as  civihzation  is  a  race  of  borrowing, 
nations  Hke  England  and  France  and  Germany  a  few  hundred 
miles  apart  from  one  another,  set  the  pace  for  a  nation  that  is 
three  thousand  miles  away  from  where  it  can  borrow,  like  the 
United  States.  It  is  a  far  cry  from  the  land  of  the  Greeks  with 
their  still  sunny  temples  and  dreams,  and  from  England  with 
its  quiet-singing  churches,  to  New  York  with  its  practical  sky- 
scraping  hewing  prayer! 

New  York  —  scooping  its  will  out  of  the  very  heavens ! 

New  York  —  the  World's  last,  most  stern,  perhaps  most  man- 
ful prayer  of  all  —  half -asking  and  half -grasping  out  of  the 
hand  of  God! 

Here  is  America's  religion!  Half  afraid  at  first,  half  glad, 
slowly,  solemnly  triumphant,  as  on  the  edge  of  an  abyss,  I 
have  seen  America's  religion!  I  have  seen  my  brother  Ameri- 
cans hewing  it  out  —  day  by  day,  night  by  night,  have  I  seen 
them  —  in  these  huge  steel  sub-cellars  of  the  sky ! 

I  have  accepted  the  challenge. 

If  it  is  not  a  religion,  then  it  shall  be  to  us  a  religion  to  make  it 
a  religion. 

The  Metropolitan  Tower  with  its  big  clock  dial,  with  its 
three  stories  of  telling  what  time  it  is,  and  its  great  bell  singing 
hymns  above  the  dizzy  flocks  of  the  skyscrapers,  is  the  soul  of 
New  York,  to  me. 


140  CROWDS 

If  one  could  see  a  soul  —  if  one  could  see  the  soul  of  New 
York,  it  would  look  more  like  the  Metropolitan  Tower  than 
anything  else. 

It  seems  to  be  trying  to  speak  away  up  there  in  the  white- 
ness and  the  light,  the  very  soul  of  the  young  resistless  iron- 
hearted  city. 

I  write  as  an  American.  To  me  there  is  something  about 
it  as  I  come  up  the  harbour  that  fills  my  heart  with  a  big  ring- 
ing, as  if  all  the  world  were  ringing,  ringing  once  more  —  ringing 
all  over  again  —  up  in  this  white  tower  of  ours  in  its  new  bit  of 
blue  sky!  I  glory  in  England  with  it,  in  Greece,  in  Bethlehem. 
It  is  as  an  outpost  on  Space  and  Time,  for  all  of  us  gathering 
up  all  history  in  it  softly  —  once  more  and  pointing  it  to  God ! 

It  is  the  last,  the  youngest-minded,  the  most  buoyant  tower 
—  the  mighty  Child  among  the  steeples  of  the  world.  The 
lonely  towers  of  Cologne  stretching  with  that  grave  and  empty 
nave  against  the  sky,  out  of  that  old  and  faded  region  of  religion, 
far  away,  tremulously  send  greetings  to  it  —  to  this  white 
tower  in  the  west  —  to  where  it  goes  up  with  its  crowds  of 
people  in  it,  with  business  and  with  daily  Uving  and  hoping  and 
dying  in  it,  and  strikes  heaven! 

It  may  be  perhaps  only  the  American  blood  in  me.  Perhaps 
it  is  raw  and  new  to  be  so  happy.  I  do  not  know.  I  only 
know  that  to  me  the  Metropolitan  Tower  is  saying  something 
that  has  been  never  quite  said  before  —  something  that  has 
been  given  in  some  special  sense  to  us  as  a  trust  from  the  world. 
It  is  to  me  the  steeple  of  democracy  —  of  our  democracy,  Eng- 
land's democracy  —  the  world's  democracy.  The  hollow 
domes  of  Sts.  Peter  and  Paul,  and  all  the  rest  with  their 
vague,  airy  other-worldliness,  all  soaring  and  tugging  hke  so 
many  balloons  of  religion  and  goodness,  trying  to  get  away  from 
this  world  —  are  not  to  me  so  splendid,  so  magnificently  wilful 
as  the  Metropolitan  Tower  —  as  the  souls  of  these  modern, 
heaven-striking  men,  taking  the  world  itself,  at  last,  its  streets 
of  stone,  of  steel,  its  very  tunnels  and  lifting  them  up  as  blind 


TOUCHING  THE  IMAGINATION  OF  CROWDS  141 

offerings,  as  unbounded  instincts,  as  prayers,  as  songs  to 
heaven! 

I  worship  my  country,  my  people,  my  city  when  I  hear  the 
big  bell  in  it  and  when  I  look  up  to  where  the  tower  is  in  that 
still  place  hke  a  sea  —  look  up  to  where  that  Httle  white  coun- 
try belfry  sits  in  the  Hght,  in  the  dark  above  the  vast  and 
roaring  city! 

To  me,  the  Metropohtan  Tower,  sweeping  up  its  prayer  out 
of  the  streets  the  way  it  does,  and  doing  it,  too,  right  beside  that 
little  safe,  tucked-in,  trim,  Sunday  rehgion  of  the  Madison 
Square  Presbyterian  Church,  lifts  itself  up  as  one  of  the  mighty 
signs  and  portents  of  our  time.  Have  I  not  heard  the  bell 
toUing  to  the  people  in  the  midst  of  business  and  singing  great 
hymns?  A  great  city  lifts  itself  and  prays  in  it  —  prays  while 
it  sings  and  clangs  so  absent-looking  below. 

I  like  to  go  out  before  going  to  sleep  and  take  a  look  at  it  — 
one  more  look  before  I  sleep,  upon  the  tower,  strong,  unyield- 
ing, alive,  sinewy,  imperturbable,  hfting  up  within  itself  the 
steel  and  soul  of  the  world.     I  am  content  to  go  to  sleep. 

It  is  a  kind  of  steeple  of  the  business  of  this  world.  I  would 
never  have  said  that  business  needed  a  steeple  before  until  I 
saw  the  Metropolitan  Tower  and  heard  it  singing  above  the 
streets.  But  I  had  always  wanted  (without  knowing  it),  in  a 
modern  office  building,  a  great  solemn  bell  to  remind  us  what 
the  common  day  was.  I  like  to  hear  it  striking  a  common 
hour  and  what  can  be  done  in  it.  I  stop  in  the  street  to  listen 
—  to  Usten  while  that  great  hive  of  people  tolls  —  tolls  not  the 
reveries  of  monks  above  the  roofs  of  the  skyscrapers,  but  the 
religion  of  business  —  of  the  real  and  daily  things,  the  serious- 
ness of  the  mighty  street  and  the  faces  of  the  men  and  the 
women. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  STUPENDOUS,  THE  UNUSUAL,  THE   MONOTO- 
NOUS, AND  THE  SUCCESSFUL 

THE  imagination  of  crowds  may  be  said  to  be  touched  most 
successfully  when  it  is  appealed  to  in  one  of  four  ways : 
The  Stupendous. 
The  Unusual. 
The  Monotonous. 
The  Successful. 

Of  these  four  ways,  the  stupendous,  or  the  unusual,  or 
the  successful  are  the  most  in  evidence,  and  have  something 
showy  about  them,  so  that  we  can  look  at  them  afterward, 
and  point  out  at  a  glance  what  they  have  done.  But  probably 
the  underhold  on  the  crowd,  the  real  grip  on  its  imagination, 
the  one  which  does  the  plain,  hard,  everyday  work  on  a  crowd 's 
ideals,  which  determines  what  crowds  expect  and  what  crowds 
are  like  inside  —  is  the  Monotonous. 

The  man  who  tells  the  most  people  what  they  shall  be  like 
in  this  world  is  not  the  great  man  or  the  unusual  man.  He 
is  the  montonous  man. 

He  is  the  man,  to  each  of  us,  who  determines  the  unconscious 
beat  and  rhythm  with  which  we  live  our  daily  lives. 

If  we  wanted  to  touch  the  imaginations  of  crowds,  or  of 
any  particular  crowd,  with  goodness,  the  best  way  to  do  it 
would  probably  be,  not  to  go  to  the  crowd  itself,  but  to  the 
man  who  is  so  placed  that  he  determines  the  crowd's  monot- 
ony, the  daily  rhythm  with  which  it  lives  —  the  man,  if  we  can 
find  him,  who  arranges  the  crowd's  heart-beat. 

It  need  not  take  one  very  long  to  decide  who  the  man  i^ 

112 


STUPENDOUS.  MONOTONOUS.  SUCCESSFUL     US 

who  determines  the  crowd's  heart-beat.  The  man  who  has 
the  most  dominion  over  the  imaginations  of  most  of  us,  who 
stands  up  high  before  us  out  in  front  of  our  hves,  the  man 
who,  as  with  a  great  baton,  day  after  day,  night  after  night, 
conducts,  as  some  great  symphony,  the  fate  of  the  world  above 
our  heads,  who  determines  the  deep,  unconscious  thoughts 
and  motives,  the  inner  music  or  sing-song,  in  which  we  live 
our  lives,  is  the  man  to  whom  we  look  for  our  daily  bread. 

It  is  the  men  with  whom  we  earn  our  money  who  are  tell- 
ing us  all  relentlessly,  silently,  what  we  will  have  to  be  like. 
The  men  with  whom  we  spend  it,  who  sell  things  to  us,  like 
the  department  stores,  those  huge  machines  of  attention, 
may  succeed  in  getting  great  sweeps  of  attention  out  of  crowds 
at  special  times,  by  appealing  to  men  through  the  unusual 
and  through  the  stupendous  or  the  successful.  But  what 
really  counts,  and  what  finally  decides  what  men  and  what 
women  shall  be,  what  really  gets  their  attention  unfathomably, 
unconsciously,  is  the  way  they  earn  their  money.  The  feel- 
ing men  come  to  have  about  a  fact,  of  its  being  what  it  is, 
helplessly  or  whether  or  no  —  the  feeling  that  they  come  to 
have  about  something,  of  its  being  immemorially  and  innu- 
merably the  same  everywhere  and  forever,  comes  from  what 
they  are  thinking  and  the  way  they  think  while  they  are 
earning  their  money.  It  is  out  of  the  subconscious  and  the 
monotonous  that  all  our  little  heavens  and  hells  are  made. 
It  is  our  daily  work  that  becomes  to  us  the  real  floor  and  roof 
of  living,  hugs  up  under  us  like  the  ground,  fits  itself  down 
over  us,  and  is  our  earth  and  sky.  The  man  with  whom  we 
earn  our  money,  the  man  who  employs  us,  his  thinking  or 
not  thinking,  his  "I  will"  and  "I  won't,"  are  the  iron  bound- 
aries of  the  world  to  us.  He  is  the  skylight  and  the  manhole 
of  life. 

The  monotonous,  the  innumerable  and  over  and  over  again, 
one's  desk,  one's  typewriter,  one's  machine,  one's  own  partic- 
ular factory   window,   the   tall   chimney,    the    little    forever 


144  CROWDS 

motion  with  one's  hand  —  it  is  these,  godlike,  inscrutable, 
speechless,  out  of  the  depths  of  our  unconsciousness  and 
down  through  our  dreams,  that  become  the  very  breath  and 
rumble  of  living  to  us,  domineer  over  our  imaginations  and 
rule  our  lives.  It  is  decreed  that  what  our  Employers  think 
and  let  us  know  enough  to  think  shall  be  a  part  of  the  inner 
substance  of  our  being.  It  shall  be  a  part  of  growing  of  the 
grass  to  us,  and  shall  be  as  water  and  food  and  sleep.  It 
shall  be  to  us  as  the  shouts  of  boys  at  play  in  the  field  and  as 
the  crying  of  our  children  in  the  night.  To  most  men  Em- 
ployers are  the  great  doors  that  creak  at  the  end  of  the  world. 

It  is  not  the  houses  that  people  live  in,  or  the  theatres  that 
they  go  to,  or  the  churches  to  which  they  belong,  or  the  street 
and  number  —  the  East  End  look  or  the  West  End  look  the 
great  city  carves  on  the  faces  of  these  men  I  see  in  the  street 
—  that  determines  what  the  men  are  like. 

Their  daily  work  lies  deeper  in  them  than  their  faces.  One 
finds  one's  self  as  one  flashes  by  being  told  things  in  their  walk, 
in  the  way  they  hold  their  hands  and  swing  their  feet. 

And  what  is  it  their  hands  and  feet,  umbrellas,  bundles, 
and  the  wrinkles  in  their  clothes  tell  us  about  them.'' 

They  tell  us  how  they  earn  their  money.  Their  hopes, 
their  sorrow,  their  fears  and  curses,  their  convictions,  their 
very  religions  are  the  silent,  irrevocable,  heavenly  minded, 
diabolical  by-products  of  what  their  Employers  think  they 
can  afford  to  let  them  know  enough  to  think. 

"Fight  for  yourselves.  Your  masters  hate  you.  They  would  shoot  you  down 
like  rabbits,  but  they  need  your  laboiu-  for  their  huge  profits.  Don't  go  in  till 
you  get  your  minimum.  No  Royal  Commission,  no  promise  in  the  future. 
Leaders  only  want  your  votes;  they  will  sell  you.  They  lie.  Parliament  lies, 
and  will  not  help  you,  but  is  trying  to  sell  you.  Don't  touch  a  tool  till  you  get 
your  minimum.   Win,  win,  win !    It  is  up  to  all  workers  to  support  the  miners.' ' 

If  a  man  happens  to  be  an  employer,  and  happens  to  know 
that  he  is  not  this  sort  of  man,  and  finds  that  he  cannot  suc- 
cessfully carry  on  his  business  unless  he  can  make  five  hun- 


STUPENDOUS,  MONOTONOUS,  SUCCESSFUL     145 

dred  men  in  his  factory  believe  it,  what  can  he  do?  How 
can  he  touch  their  imaginations?  What  language  is  there, 
either  of  words  or  of  action,  that  will  lead  them  to  see  that 
he  is  a  really  a  fair-minded,  competent  employer,  a  repre- 
sentative of  the  interests  of  all,  a  fellow-citizen,  a  Crowdman, 
and  that  his  men  can  afford  to  believe  in  him  and  cooperate 
with  them? 

If  they  think  he  would  shoot  them  down  like  rabbits,  it 
is  because  they  have  not  the  remotest  idea  what  he  is  really 
like.  They  have  not  noticed  him.  They  have  no  imagina- 
tion about  him,  have  not  put  themselves  in  his  place.  How 
can  he  get  their  attention? 


CHAPTER  XI 
THE  SUCCESSFUL 

A  LITTLE  while  ago  I  saw  in  Paris  an  American  woman, 
the  President  of  a  Woman's  Club  (I  imagined),  who  was  doing 
as  she  should,  and  was  going  about  in  a  cab  appreciating  Paris, 
drive  up  to  the  Louvre.  Leaving  her  cab,  though  I  wondered  a 
little  why  she  did,  at  the  door,  she  hurried  up  the  steps  and 
swept  into  the  gallery,  taking  her  eleven-year-old  boy  with 
her,  I  came  upon  her  several  times.  The  Louvre  did  not  in- 
terest the  boy,  and  he  seemed  to  be  bothering  and  troubling 
his  mother,  and  of  course  he  kept  trying  very  hard,  as  any 
really  nice  boy  would,  to  get  out;  but  she  would  not  let  him, 
and  he  wandered  about  dolefully,  looking  at  his  feet  and  at 
the  floor,  or  at  the  guards,  and  doing  the  best  he  could.  Finally 
she  came  over  to  him;  there  was  a  Murillo  he  must  see  —  it 
was  the  opportunity  of  his  life;  she  brought  him  over  to  it, 
and  stood  him  up  in  front  of  it,  and  he  would  not  look;  she 
took  his  small  brown  head  in  her  hands  and  steered  it  to  the 
great  masterpiece  and  held  it  there  —  on  that  poor,  silent, 
helpless  Murillo  —  until     .     .     . 

I  observed  that  she  could  steer  his  head;  but  I  could  not 
help  thinking  how  much  more  she  would  have  done  if  she 
had  known  how  to  steer  it  inside. 

The  invention  of  the  Megaphone,  of  the  Cinema,  and  the 
London  Times,  and  of  the  Bible,  are  all  a  part  of  the  great,  happy, 
hopeful  effort  of  one  part  of  this  world  to  get  the  attention 
of  the  other  part  of  it,  and  steer  heads  inside. 

This  art  of  steering  heads  inside,  which  has  come  to  be  the 
secret  art  of  all  the  other  arts,  the  secret  religion  of  all  the  re- 

146 


THE  SUCCESSFUL  147 

ligions,  is  also  the  secret  of  building  and  maintaining  a  civili- 
zation and  a  successful  and  permanent  business.  It  is  hard 
to  believe  how  largely,  for  the  last  twenty  years,  it  has  been 
overlooked  by  employers  as  the  real  key  of  the  labour  prob- 
lem —  this  art  of  steering  people's  heads  inside. 

We  have  seen  part  of  the  truth.  We  have  put  in  a  good 
deal  of  time  in  finding  fault  with  labouring  men  for  thinking 
too  much  about  themselves  and  about  their  class,  and  for 
emphasizing  their  wages  more  than  their  work,  and  for  not 
having  more  noble  and  disinterested  characters.  Parlia- 
ments, clergymen,  and  employers  have  all  been  troubled  for 
years  about  Labour,  and  they  have  been  trying  very  hard 
on  Sundays  and  through  reports  of  speeches  by  members  of 
Parliament  in  the  daily  press,  and  through  laws,  and  through 
employers'  associations,  and  through  factory  rules  and  fines, 
to  get  the  attention  of  labouring  men  and  lift  their  thoughts 
to  higher  things. 

A  great  many  wise  things  have  been  said  to  Labour  — 
masterpieces,  miles  of  them  as  it  were,  whole  Louvres  of 
words  have  been  hung  upon  their  walls. 

But  in  vain! 

And  all  because  we  have  merely  taken  the  outside  of  the 
boy's  head  in  our  hands.  We  have  not  thought  what  was 
really  going  on  in  it.  We  have  not  tried  to  steer  it  inside. 
We  have  been  superficial. 

It  is  superficial  for  a  comfortable  man  with  a  bun  in  his 
pocket  to  talk  to  a  starving  man  about  having  some  higher 
motive  than  getting  something  to  eat.  Everybody  sees 
that  this  is  superficial,  if  we  mean  by  it  that  his  body  is  starv- 
ing. But  if  we  mean  something  more  real  and  more  terrible 
than  that  —  that  he  is  starving  inside,  that  his  soul  is  starv- 
ving,  that  he  has  nothing  to  five  for,  no  real  object  in  getting 
something  to  eat  —  if  we  mean  by  it,  in  other  words,  that 
the  man's  imagination  is  not  touched  even  by  his  own  life, 
people  take  it  very  hghtly. 


148  CROWDS 

And  it  is  the  most  important  thing  in  the  world.  The 
one  thing  now  necessary  to  society,  to  industry,  is  to  get 
hold  of  the  men  who  are  in  it,  one  by  one,  and  touch  their 
imaginations  about  themselves.  We  have  millions  of  men 
working  without  their  thoughts  and  expectations  being  venti- 
lated or  passed  along,  year  after  year. 

One  sees  these  men  everywhere  one  goes,  in  thousands 
of  factories,  doing  their  work  without  any  draught.  We 
already  have  tall  chimneys  for  our  coal  furnaces;  we  have 
next  to  see  the  value  of  tall  chimneys,  great  jflues  to  the  sky, 
on  the  lives  and  thought  and  the  inner  energies  of  men. 

The  most  obvious  way  to  get  a  draught  on  a  man,  to  get 
him  to  glow  up  and  work  is  to  cut  through  an  opening  in  the 
top  of  his  life. 

Just  where  to  cut  this  opening,  and  just  how  to  cut  it  in 
each  man's  life  —  each  man  considered  as  a  problem  by  him- 
seK  —  is  the  Labour  problem. 

There  are  certain  general  principles  that  might  be  put 
down  in  passing.  To  begin  with,  we  must  not  feel  ashamed 
to  begin  implacably  with  the  actual  man  just  as  he  is,  and 
with  the  wants  and  the  motives  that  he  actually  has.  We 
should  feel  ashamed  rather  to  begin  in  any  other  way.  It 
would  not  be  bright  or  thoughtful  to  begin  on  him  with  mo- 
tives he  is  going  to  have;  and  it  certainly  would  not  be  relig- 
ious or  worthy  of  us  to  try  to  make  him  begin  with  ours.  Per- 
haps ours  are  better  —  for  us.  Perhaps,  too,  ours  will  be 
better  for  him  when  he  is  like  us  (if  we  can  give  him  any  rea- 
son to  want  to  be).  In  the  meantime,  what  is  there  that 
can  honestly  be  called  base  in  taking  human  nature  as  it  is 
and  in  allowing  a  sliding  scale  of  motives  in  people.'^  Starv- 
ing people  and  slaves,  or  people  who  are  ugly  and  hateful, 
i.  e.,  not  really  quite  bright  toward  others,  who  impute  mean, 
inaccurate  motives  to  them,  can  only  be  patiently  expected 
to  have  a  very  small  area  or  even  mote  of  unselfishness  at 
first.     A   cross-section  of  our  society  to-day  represents  the 


THE  SUCCESSFUL  149 

entire  geological  formation  of  human  nature  for  40,000  years. 
We  need  but  look  on  the  faces  of  the  men  about  us  as  we  go 
down  the  street.     All  history  is  here  this  minute. 

We  wish  that  Labour  had  better  motives.  We  wish  to 
get  our  workmen  to  understand  us  better  and  believe  in  us 
more  and  work  for  us  harder. 

We  agree  that  we  must  begin  with  them,  if  we  propose  to  do 
this,  where  they  are. 

Where  are  they.'' 

There  are  certain  general  observations  that  might  seem 
to  the  point. 

1.  If  a  man  is  a  sane  and  sound  man  and  works  hard,  he 
must  feel  that  everything  he  does,  every  minute,  is  definitely 
connected  with  the  main  through-train  purpose  in  his  life. 

2.  If  the  main  purpose  in  his  life  is  domestic  and  con- 
sists in  having  his  family  live  well  and  giving  his  children 
a  chance,  he  must  feel  and  be  absolutely  sure  when  he  is  work- 
ing better  or  working  worse  for  his  employer  that  he  is 
working  better  or  worse  for  himself  and  for  those  for  whom 
he  hves. 

3.  In  the  ordinary  labourer  this  domestic  unselfishness 
or  house  patriotism  is  a  kind  of  miniature  pubhc  spirit.  It 
is  the  elementary  form  of  his  national  or  human  enthusiasm. 
It  is  the  form  of  disinterestedness  that  has  to  be  attended 
to  in  men  first;  and  the  way  for  society  to  get  the  labouring 
man  to  be  public-spirited,  to  have  the  habit  of  considering 
the  rights  of  others,  is  for  society  to  have  the  habit  of  consid- 
ering his  rights  in  his  daily  work.  An  intelligent,  live  man 
must  be  allowed  a  little  margin  to  practise  being  unselfish 
on,  if  only  in  the  privacy  of  his  own  family.  Unselfishness 
begins  in  small  circles.  The  starving  man  must  be  allowed 
a  smaller  range  of  unselfishness  than  the  man  who  has  enough. 
It  is  not  uncompUmentary  or  unworthy  in  human  nature 
to  admit  that  this  is  so  —  to  demand  that  the  human  being 
who  is  starving  must  be  allowed  to  be  selfish.     If  he  is  not 


150  CROWDS 

bright  enough  to  be  selfish  when  he  is  hungry  he  is  dangerous 
to  society.  We  ought  to  insist  upon  his  being  selfish,  and 
help  him  in  it.     Virtue  is  a  surplus. 

4.  This  is  the  first  humble,  stuttering  speech  the  com- 
petent modern  employer  who  proposes  to  express  himself 
to  his  men,  and  get  them  to  understand  him  and  work  with 
him,  is  going  to  make.  He  is  going  to  pick  out  one  by  one 
every  man  in  his  works  who  has  a  decent,  modest,  manly 
desire  to  be  selfish,  and  help  him  in  it.  He  is  going  to  do 
something  or  say  something  that  will  make  the  man  see, 
that  will  make  him  believe  for  life,  that  the  most  powerful, 
the  most  trustworthy,  the  most  far-sighted  man  he  can  find 
in  the  world  to  be  his  partner  in  being  decently,  soundly, 
and  respectfully  selfish  —  is  his  employer. 

No  employer  can  expect  to  get  the  best  work  out  of  a  man 
except  by  working  down  through  to  the  inner  organic  desire 
in  the  man  as  a  man,  except  by  waking  his  selfishness  up 
and  by  making  it  a  larger,  fuller,  nobler,  weightier  selfishness, 
and  turning  the  full  weight  of  it  every  minute,  every  hour, 
on  his  daily  work. 

The  best  language  an  employer  can  find  to  express  this 
desire  at  first  to  his  workmen,  is  some  form  of  faithful,  honest 
copartnership. 

5.  The  ordinary  wage  labourer  has  little  imagination 
about  other  people  because  he  is  not  allowed  any  about  him- 
self. The  moment  he  is,  and  the  moment  his  employer  ar- 
ranges his  work  so  that  he  sees  every  minute  all  day  that 
the  work  which  he  does  for  the  firm  30  per  cent  better  counts. 
30  per  cent  more  on  his  own  main  purpose  in  life,  his  imagina- 
tion is  touched  about  himself  and  he  begins  to  work  like  a 
human  being.  When  a  man  has  been  allowed  to  work  awhile 
as  a  human  being  he  will  begin  to  be  human  with  a  wider 
range.  Being  a  partner  touches  the  imagination  and  wakes 
the  man's  humanness  up.  He  not  only  works  better,  but 
he  loves  his  family  better  when  he  sees  he  can  do  something 


THE  SUCCESSFUL  151 

for  them.     He  serves  his  town  better  and  his  lodge  better 
when  he  sees  he  can  do  something  for  them. 

6.  Being  a  partner  wakes  the  man's  imagination  toward 
those  who  work  with  him,  and  toward  the  pubHc  and  the 
markets  and  the  goods  and  the  cities  where  the  goods  go. 
He  reads  newspapers  with  a  new  eye.  He  becomes  interested 
in  people  who  buy  the  goods,  and  in  people  who  do  not.  Why 
do  they  not?  He  gropes  toward  .a  general  interest  in  human 
nature,  and  begins  to  live. 

7.  A  man  who  is  being  paid  wages  one  night  in  a  week, 
has  his  imagination  touched  about  his  work  one  night  in  the 
week.  He  is  merely  being  a  wage-earner.  In  being  a  part- 
ner he  is  being  paid,  and  feels  his  pay  coming  in,  every  thirty 
seconds,  in  the  better  way  he  moves  his  hands  or  does  not 
move  his  hands.     This  makes  him  a  man. 

8.  And,  finally,  as  he  knows  he  is  being  paid,  and  that 
he  always  will  be  paid,  what  he  earns,  he  stops  thinking  of 
the  sick,  tired  side  of  his  work  —  the  pay  he  gets  out  of  it, 
and  begins  to  love  the  work  itself,  and  begins  to  be  perfect  in 
it  for  its  own  sake.     This  makes  him  a  gentleman. 

9.  Being  a  partner  makes  a  man  actively  and  keenly 
reasonable  and  practical,  not  only  about  his  own  labour, 
but  about  the  superior  value  of  other  people  with  whom  he 
works.  He  wants  the  best  people  in  the  best  places.  He 
begins  to  have  a  practical  partner's  imagination  about  the 
men  who  are  over  him,  and  about  their  knowing  more  than 
he  does.  If  he  is  merely  paid  wages,  he  is  superstitious, 
and  jealous  toward  those  who  know  more  than  he  does.  If 
he  is  paid  profits,  he  is  glad  that  they  do,  and  strikes  in  and 
helps. 

10.  Another  complete  range  of  motives  is  soon  offered 
to  the  employee  who  is  a  partner.  He  feels  the  joy  of 
being  a  part  of  a  big,  splendid  whole,  a  disinterested  de- 
light and  pride  in  others.  He  grows  young  with  it,  like  a  boy 
in  school. 


152  CROWDS 

Here  is  the  factory  over  him,  around  him  —  his  own  vast 
hockey  team  —  and  over  that  is  the  nation,  and  over  that 
is  the  world! 

An  employer  can  touch  the  imagination  of  most  men,  of  the 
rank  and  file  of  the  people,  ninety-nine  times  where  other  people 
can  touch  it  once.  And  every  time  he  touches  it,  he  touches 
it  to  the  point. 

If  men  in  general  do  not  believe  to-day  in  religion  and  do  not 
want  it,  it  is  because  they  have  employers  who  have  not  seen 
any  place  in  their  business  where  they  could  get  their  religion  in, 
and  have  kept  the  people  (in  the  one  place  where  they  could 
really  learn  what  religion  is)  from  learning  anything  about  it. 
The  moment  the  more  common  employers  see  what  the  great 
ones  see  now,  that  business  is  the  one  particular  place  in  this 
world  where  religion  really  works,  works  the  hardest,  the  long- 
est, and  the  best,  works  as  it  had  never  been  dreamed  a  religion 
could  be  made  to  work  before  —  the  day  school  teachers  of 
the  world,  put  the  Golden  Rule  in  the  Course  everybody  will 
know  it. 

It  only  takes  a  moment's  thought  to  see  what  the  employers 
of  the  world  could  do  with  the  Golden  Rule  the  moment  they 
take  hold  of  it. 

One  has  but  to  consider  what  they  have  done  with  it  al- 
ready. 

One  has  but  to  consider  the  astounding  way  in  the  last  fifteen 
years  they  have  made  everybody  not-believe  in  it. 

The  employers  of  the  world  have  been  saying  ten  hours  a 
day  to  everybody  that  the  Golden  Rule  is  a  foolish,  pleasant, 
inefficient,  worsted  motto  on  a  parlour  wall. 

Everybody  has  believed  it. 

And  now  that  the  big  employers  are  setting  the  pace  and  are 
saying  exactly  the  opposite  thing  about  the  Golden  Rule,  now 
that  all  the  employers  are  trying  to  get  their  employees  to  be 
eflficient  (to  do  by  their  employers  as  they  would  be  done  by), 
and  now  that  they  are  trying  to  be  efficient  themselves  (are 


THE  SUCCESSFUL  153 

trying  to  do  to  their  employees  as  they  would  have  their 
employees  do  to  them),  the  Golden  Rule  is  touching  the 
imagination  of  crowds,  and  the  crowd  is  seeing  that  the 
Golden  Rule  works.  They  watch  it  working  every  day 
in  the  things  they  know  about.  Then  they  beUeve  in  it  for 
other  things. 


CHAPTER  XII 
THE  NECKS  OF  THE  WICKED 

A  LETTER  lies  before  me,  one  out  of  many  others  asking 
me  how  the  author  of  "The  Shadow  Christ,"  which  is  a  study 
of  the  rehgious  values  in  suffering  and  self-sacrifice  in  this 
world,  takes  the  low  ground  that  honesty  is  the  best  policy. 

I  know  two  kinds  of  men  who  believe  that  honesty  is  the 
best  policy. 

These  two  men  use  exactly  the  same  words  "Honesty 
is  the  best  policy." 

One  man  says  it. 

The  other  man  sings  it. 

One  man  is  honest  because  it  pays. 

The  other  man  is  honest  because  he  likes  it. 

"Honesty  is  the  best  policy"  as  a  motive  cannot  be  called 
religious,  but  "Honesty  is  the  best  policy  "  as  a  Te  Deum, 
as  something  a  man  sings  in  his  heart  every  day  about  God, 
something  he  sings  about  human  nature  is  religious,  and 
believing  it  the  way  some  men  believe  it,  is  an  act  of  worship. 

It  is  like  a  great  gentle  mass. 

It  is  like  taking  softly  up  one's  own  planet  and  offering 
it  to  God. 

Here  it  is  —  the  planet.  Honesty  is  organized  in  the  rocks 
on  it  and  in  the  oak  trees  on  it  and  in  the  people.  The  rivers 
flow  to  the  sea  and  the  heart  of  Man  flows  to  God.  On  this 
one  planet,  at  least,  God  is  a  success. 

Possibly  it  is  because  many  other  people  beside  myself 
have  been  slow  in  clearly  making  this  distinction  between 
"Honesty  is  the  best  policy"  as  a  motive  or  a  Te  Deum,  that 

15^ 


THE  NECKS  OF  THE  WICKED  155 

I  have  come  upon  so  many  religious  men  and  women  in  the 
last  two  or  three  years,  who,  in  the  finest  spirit,  have  seemed 
to  me  to  be  doing  all  that  they  could  to  discourage  every- 
body especially  to  discourage  me,  about  the  Golden  Rule. 

The  first  objection  which  they  put  forward  to  the  Golden 
Rule  is  that  it  is  a  failure. 

When  I  try  to  deal  with  this  or  try  to  tell  them  about  Non- 
Gregarious,  the  second  objection  that  they  put  forward  is, 
that  it  is  a  success. 

If  they  cannot  discourage  me  with  one  of  these  objections 
they  try  to  discourage  me  with  the  other. 

They  point  to  the  Cross. 

Some  days  I  cannot  help  wondering  what  Christ  would 
think  if  He  were  to  come  back  and  find  people,  all  these  good 
Christian  people  everywhere  using  the  Cross  —  the  Cross 
of  all  things  in  the  world  as  an  objection  to  the  Golden  Rule 
and  to  its  working  properly,  or  as  a  general  argument  against 
expecting  anything  of  anybody. 

I  do  not  know  that  I  have  any  philosophy  about  it  that 
would  be  of  any  value  to  others. 

I  only  know  that  I  am  angry  all  through  when  I  hear  a 
certain  sort  of  man  saying,  and  apparently  proving,  that 
the  Golden  Rule  does  not  work. 

And  I  am  angry  at  other  people  who  are  listening  with 
me  because  they  are  not  angry  too. 

Why  are  people  so  complacent  about  crosses?  And  why 
are  they  willing  to  keep  on  having  and  expecting  to  have 
in  this  world  all  the  good  people  on  crosses.'*  Why  do  they 
keep  on  treating  these  crosses  year  after  year,  century  after 
century,  in  a  dull  tired  way  as  if  they  had  become  a  kind  of 
conventionality  of  God's,  a  kind  of  good  old  church  custom, 
something  that  He  and  the  Church  by  this  time,  after  two 
thousand  years,  could  not  really  expect  to  try  to  get  over 
or  improve  upon.' 

I  do  not  know  that  I  ought  to  feel  as  I  do. 


156  CROWDS 

I  only  know  that  the  moment  I  see  evil  triumphing  in  this 
world,  there  is  one  thing  that  that  evil  comes  up  against. 

It  comes  up  against  my  will. 

My  will,  so  far  as  it  goes,  is  a  spiritual  fact. 

I  do  not  argue  about  it,  nor  do  I  know  that  I  wish  to 
justify  it.    I  merely  accept  my  will  as  it  is,  as  one  spiritual  fact. 

I  propose  to  know  what  to  do  with  it  next. 

The  first  thing  that  I  have  done,  of  course,  has  been  to 
find  out  that  there  are  millions  of  other  so-called  Christian 
people  who  have  encountered  this  same  fact  that  I  have  en- 
countered. 

There  are  at  least  some  of  us  who  stand  together.  Our 
wills  are  set  against  having  any  more  people  die  on  crosses 
in  this  world  than  can  be  helped.  If  there  is  any  kind  of 
skill,  craftmanship,  technique,  psychology,  knowledge  of 
human  nature  which  can  be  brought  to  bear,  which  will  keep 
the  best  people  in  this  world  not  only  from  being,  but  from 
belonging  on  crosses  in  it,  we  propose  to  bring  these  things 
to  bear.  We  are  not  willing  to  beheve  that  crowds  are  not 
inclined  to  Goodness.  We  are  not  willing  to  slump  down 
on  any  general  slovenly  assumption  about  the  world  that 
goodness  cannot  be  made  to  work  in  it. 

If  goodness  is  not  efficient  in  this  world  we  will  make  it 
efficient. 

Our  reason  for  saying  this  is  that  we  honestly  glory  in  this 
world.  We  believe  that  at  this  moment  while  we  are  still 
on  it,  it  is  in  the  act  of  being  a  great  world,  that  it  is  God's 
world,  and  in  God's  Name  we  will  defend  its  reputation. 

We  do  not  deny  that  it  may  be  better  spiritual  etiquette, 
more  heroic  looking  and  may  have  a  certain  moral  grace, 
so  far  as  a  man  himself  is  concerned,  if  the  world  makes  him 
suffer  for  being  honest.  But  after  all  he  is  only  one  man, 
and  whether  he  dislikes  his  suffering  or  likes  it  and  feels  fine 
and  spiritual  over  it,  it  is  only  one  man's  suffering. 

But  why  is  it  that  when  the  world  makes  a  man  suffer^ 


THE  NECKS  OF  THE  WICKED  157 

everybody  should  seem  always  to  be  thinking  of  the  man? 
Why  does  not  anybody  think  of  the  world? 

Is  not  the  fact  that  a  whole  world,  eternal  and  innumerable, 
is  supposed  to  be  such  a  mean,  dishonest  sort  of  a  world  that 
it  will  make  a  man  suffer  for  being  good  a  more  important 
fact  than  the  man's  suffering  is?  It  seems  to  me  to  be  tak- 
ing not  lower  but  higher  ground  when  one  insists  on  believing 
in  the  race  one  belongs  to  and  in  believing  that  it  is  a  human 
race  that  can  be  believed  in.  After  two  thousand  years  of 
Christ,  it  is  a  lazy,  tired,  anaemic  slander  on  the  world  to 
believe  that  it  does  not  pay  to  be  good  in  it.  The  man  who 
believes  it,  and  acts  as  if  he  believed  it,  is  to-day  and  has  been 
from  the  beginning  of  time  the  supreme  enemy  of  us  all.  He 
is  guilty  before  heaven  and  before  us  all  and  in  all  nations 
of  high  treason  to  the  human  race.  One  of  the  next  most 
important  things  to  do  in  modern  religion  is  going  to  be  to 
get  all  these  morally  dressed-up,  noble-looking  people  who 
enjoy  feeling  how  good  they  are  because  they  have  failed, 
to  examine  their  hearts,  stop  enjoying  themselves  and  think. 

For  hundreds  of  years  we  have  religiously  run  after  martyrs 
and  we  have  learned  in  a  way,  most  of  us,  to  have  a  kind  of 
cooped-up  patriotism  for  our  own  nation,  but  why  are  there  not 
more  people  who  are  patriotic  toward  the  whole  human  race? 
One  has  been  used  to  seeing  it  now  for  centuries,  good  people 
all  over  the  world  hanging  their  harps  on  willow  trees,  or  snug- 
gling down  together  by  the  cold  sluggish  stream  of  their  lives, 
and  gossiping  about  how  the  world  has  abused  them,  when 
they  would  be  far  better  occupied,  nine  out  of  ten  of  them  — 
in  doing  something  that  would  make  it  stop.  There  was  a  poet 
and  soldier  some  thousands  of  years  ago  who  put  more  real 
religion  (and  put  it  too,  into  his  imprecatory  psalms) ,  than  has 
been  put,  I  believe,  into  all  the  sweet  whinings  and  the  spiritual 
droopings  of  the  world  in  three  thousand  years.  I  do  not  deny 
that  I  would  quarrel,  as  a  matter  of  form,  with  the  lack  of 
urbanity,  with  a  certain  ill-nature  in  the  imprecatory  Psalms, 


158  CROWDS 

but  with  the  spirit  in  them,  with  the  motive  and  mighty  desire, 
with  the  necessity  in  the  man's  heart  that  was  poured  into  them, 
I  have  the  profoundest  sympathy. 

David  had  a  manly,  downright  behef.  His  behef  was 
that  if  sin  is  allowed  to  get  to  the  top  in  this  world  of  ours, 
it  is  our  fault.  David  felt  that  it  was  partly  his  —  and  being 
a  king  —  very  much  his,  and  as  he  was  trying  to  do  something 
about  it,  he  naturally  wanted  the  world  to  help. 

What  he  really  meant  —  what  lay  in  the  background  of 
his  petition  —  the  real  spirit  that  made  him  speak  out  in 
that  naive  bold  way  before  the  Lord,  and  before  everybody 
—  that  made  him  ask  the  great  God  in  heaven  all  looking 
so  white  and  so  indifferent,  to  come  right  down  please  and 
jump  on  the  necks  of  the  wicked,  was  a  vivid,  live  vision 
of  his  own  for  his  own  use  that  he  was  going  to  make  the  world 
more  decent.  He  was  spirited  about  it.  If  God  did  not. 
He  would,  and  naturally  when  he  came  to  expressing  how 
he  felt  in  prayer,  he  wanted  God  to  stand  by  him.  To  put 
it  in  good  plain  soldier-like  Hebrew,  He  wanted  God  to 
jump  on  the  necks  of  his  enemies. 

Speaking  strictly  for  ourselves,  in  our  more  modern  spirit 
of  course,  we  would  want  to  modulate  this,  we  admit  that 
we  would  not  ask  God  to  do  a  little  thing  like  jumping  on 
the  necks  of  the  wicked  —  just  for  us  —  nor  would  we  care 
to  break  away  from  the  other  things  we  are  doing  and  attend 
to  it  ourselves,  nor  would  we  even  favour  their  necks  being 
jumped  on  by  others,  but  while  we  do  not  agree  with  David's 
particular  request,  we  do  profoundly  agree  with  the  way  he 
felt  when  he  made  it.  We  would  not  make  our  flank  move- 
ment on  the  wicked  in  quite  the  same  way  and  according 
to  our  more  modern  and  more  scientific  manner  of  thought, 
we  would  want  to  do  something  more  practical  with  the  wicked, 
but  we  would  want  to  do  something  with  them  and  we  would 
want  to  do  it  now. 

As  we  look  at  it,  it  ought  not  to  be  necessary  to  jump  on 


THE  NECKS  OF  THE  WICKED  159" 

the  necks  of  the  wicked  to  make  them  good,  that  is,  to  make 
them  understand  what  they  would  wish  they  had  done  in 
twenty  years.  We  live  in  a  more  reasoning  and  precise  age 
and  what  more  particularly  concerns  us  in  the  wicked  is  not 
their  necks,  but  their  heads  and  their  hearts.  It  seems  to 
us  that  they  are  not  using  them  very  much  and  that  the  mo- 
ment they  do  and  we  can  get  them  to,  they  will  be  good. 
Possibly  it  was  a  mere  matter  of  language,  a  concession  to 
the  then  state  of  the  language  —  David's  wanting  their  necks 
to  be  jumped  on  so  that  he  could  get  their  attention  at  first 
and  make  them  stop  and  think  and  understand.  More  subtle 
ways  of  expressing  things  to  the  wicked  have  been  thought 
of  to-day  than  of  jumping  on  their  necks,  but  the  principle 
David  had  in  mind  has  not  changed,  the  principle  of  being 
loyal  to  the  human  race,  the  principle  of  standing  up  for 
people  and  insisting  that  they  were  really  meant  to  be  better 
than  they  were  or  than  they  thought  they  could  be  —  a  kind 
of  holy  patriotism  David  had  for  this  world.  The  main 
fact  about  David  seems  to  be  that  he  believed  he  belonged 
to  a  great  human  race.  Incidentally  he  believed  he  belonged 
to  a  human  race  that  was  really  quite  bright,  bright  enough 
at  least  to  make  people  sorry  for  doing  wrong  in  it  —  a  human 
race  that  was  getting  so  shrewd  and  so  just  and  so  honest 
that  it  took  stupider  and  stupider  people  every  year  to  be 
wicked,  and  when  he  found,  judging  from  recent  events  in 
Judea,  that  this  for  the  time  being  was  not  so,  he  had  a  hate- 
ful feeling  about  it,  which  it  seems  to  some  of  us,  vastly  im- 
proved him  and  would  improve  many  of  us.  We  do  not 
claim  that  the  imprecatory  Psalms  were  David's  best,  but 
they  must  have  helped  him  immensely  in  writing  the  other  ones. 


We  may  be  wrong.  But  it  has  come  to  be  an  important 
rehgious  duty  to  some  of  us,  or  rather  religious  joy,  to  hate 
the  prosperity  of  the  wicked.     We  hate  the  prosperity  of 


160  CROWDS 

the  wicked,  not  because  it  is  their  prosperity  and  not  ours, 
but  because  their  prosperity  constitutes  a  sneer  or  slander 
on  the  world.  We  have  no  idea  of  wanting  to  go  about  faith- 
fully jumping  upon  the  necks  of  the  wicked.  What  we  want 
is  to  feel  that  we  are  in  a  world  where  the  good  people  are 
happy  and  are  making  goodness  reasonable,  successful,  profit- 
able and  practical  in  it.  We  want  an  earth  with  crowds  on  it 
who  see  things  as  they  are,  and  who  guess  so  well  on  what 
they  want  (i.  e.,  who  are  good)  that  other  people  who  do  not 
know  what  they  want  and  are  not  good,  will  be  lonesome. 

We  have  made  up  our  minds  to  live  in  a  world  not  where 
the  wicked  will  feel  that  their  necks  are  going  to  be  jumped 
on  (which  is  really  a  rather  interesting  and  prominent  feel- 
ing on  the  whole),  but  a  world  where  the  wicked  will  be  made 
to  feel  that  nobody  notices  their  necks,  that  they  are  not 
worth  being  jumped  on,  a  world  where  nobody  will  have  time 
to  go  out  back  and  jump  on  them,  a  world  where  the  wicked 
will  not  be  able  to  think  of  anything  important  to  do,  and 
where  the  wicked  things  that  are  left  to  do  will  be  so  small 
and  so  stupid  that  nobody  will  notice.  They  will  be  ignored 
like  boys  with  catcalls  in  the  street.  When  we  can  make 
people  who  do  wrong  feel  unimportant  enough,  there  is  going 
to  be  some  chance  for  the  good. 

If  we  could  find  some  sweet,  proper,  gentle,  Christian- 
looking  way  of  conveying  to  these  people  for  a  few  swift, 
keen  minutes  how  little  difference  it  makes  when  they  and 
people  like  them  do  wrong,  they  would  steal  over  in  a  body 
and  do  right. 

This  is  our  program.  We  are  making  preliminary  arrange- 
ments for  a  world  in  which  after  this,  very  soon  now,  righteous- 
ness is  going  to  attend  strictly  to  its  own  business  and  unright- 
eousness is  going  to  be  crowded  out.  No  one  will  feel  that 
he  has  time  in  two  or  three  hundred  years  from  now  to  go 
out  of  his  way  into  some  obscure  corner  of  the  world  and 
jump  on  the  necks  of  the  wicked. 


THE  NECKS  OF  THE  WICKED  161 

But  this  is  a  matter  of  form.  The  main  fundamental 
manful  instinct  David  had  —  the  idea  that  there  should  not 
be  any  more  people  dying  on  crosses  than  could  be  helped  — 
that  collective  society  should  take  hold  of  Evil  and  set  it 
down  hard  in  its  chair  and  make  it  cry  seems  to  many  of  us 
absolutely  sound.  Of  course,  we  feel  that  it  is  not  for  us,  those 
who  love  righteousness,  to  jump  on  the  necks  of  the  wicked. 
We  prefer  to  have  it  attended  to  in  a  more  dignified,  imper- 
sonal way  by  Society  as  a  whole.  So  we  believe  that  society 
should  proceed  to  making  goodness  and  honesty  pay.  If 
Society  will  not  do  it  v)e  will  do  it.  The  world  may  be  against 
us  at  first  but  we  will  at  least  clear  off  a  small  place  on  it  — 
in  our  own  business  for  instance  —  where  our  goodness  can 
command  the  most  shrewdness  and  the  most  technique  — 
and  we  will  do  what  we  can  slowly  —  one  industry  at  a  time, 
to  remove  the  slander  on  goodness  that  goodness  is  not  ef- 
ficient, and  the  slander  on  the  world  that  goodness  cannot 
be  self-supporting  self-respecting  (and  without  disgrace),  even 
comfortable  in  it. 

The  old  hymn  with  which  many  of  us  are  familiar  is  well 
and  true  enough.  But  it  does  not  seem  that  standing  up 
for  Jesus  is  the  most  important  point  in  the  world  just  now. 
A  great  many  people  are  doing  it.  What  we  need  more  is 
people  who  will  stand  up  for  the  world.  When  people  who 
are  standing  up  for  the  world  stand  and  sing  "Stand  up  for 
Jesus"  it  will  begin  to  count..  Let  four  hundred  Nons  sing 
it;  and  we  will  all  go  to  church. 

If  nine  of  the  people  out  of  ten  who  are  singing  "Stand 
up  for  Jesus"  would  stand  up  for  the  world,  that  is,  if  they 
would  stop  trading  with  their  grocer  when  they  find  he  slides 
in  regularly  one  bad  orange  out  of  twelve  and  promptly  look 
up  a  grocer  who  does  not  do  such  things,  and  trade  with  him, 
it  would  not  be  necessary  for  people  to  do  as  they  so  often 
do  nowadays,  fall  back  on  a  little  wistful  half  discouraged 
last  resort  like  "standing  up  for  Jesus." 


162  CROWDS 

Standing  up  for  the  world  means  standing  by  men  who 
beHeve  in  it,  standing  by  men  who  make  everything  they 
do  in  business  a  declaration  of  their  faith  in  God  and  their 
faith  in  the  credit  of  human  nature,  men  who  put  up  money 
daily  in  their  advertising,  their  buying  and  selling,  on  the 
loyalty,  common  sense,  brains,  courage,  goodness,  and  right- 
eous indignation  of  the  people. 

The  idea  that  goodness  is  sweet  and  helpless  and  that  Jesus 
was  meek  and  lowly  and  has  to  be  stood  up  for  is  now  and 
always  has  been  a  slander.  It  does  not  seem  to  some  of  us 
that  He  would  want  to  be  stood  up  for  and  we  do  not  like 
the  way  some  people  call  Him  meek  and  lowly.  It  would 
be  more  true  to  say  that  He  merely  looks  meek  and  lowly; 
that  is,  if  most  men  had  done  or  not  done  or  had  said  or  not 
said  things  in  the  way  he  did,  they  would  have  been  considered 
meek  and  lowly  for  it.  He  had  a  way  of  using  a  soft  answer 
to  turn  away  wrath.  But  there  was  not  anything  really 
meek  and  lowly  about  his  giving  the  soft  answer.  No  meek 
and  lowly  man  would  ever  have  thought  of  such  a  thing  as 
turning  away  wrath  with  a  soft  answer.  He  would  have 
been  afraid  of  looking  weak.  He  would  not  have  had  the 
energy  or  the  honesty  or  the  spiritual  address  to  know  or 
to  think  of  a  soft  answer  that  would  do  it. 

The  spirit  of  fighting  evil  with  good  —  a  kind  of  glorious 
self-will  for  goodness,  for  doing  a  thing  the  higher  and  nobler 
way  and  making  it  work,  the  spirit  of  successful  implacably 
efficient  righteousness  is  the  last  and  most  modern  inter- 
pretation of  the  New  Testament,  the  crowd's  latest  cry  to 
its  God,  Crowds  will  always  crucify  and  crosses  will  never 
go  by.  But  we  are  going  to  have  a  higher  ideal  for  crosses. 
We  are  not  going  (out  of  sheer  shame  for  the  world),  to  think 
seriously  any  longer  of  dying  on  a  cross,  or  letting  any  one  else 
die  on  one  for  a  little  rudimentary  platitude,  a  quiet,  sensible, 
everyday  business  motto  for  any  competent  business  man 
like  "Do  unto  others  as  you  would  have  them  do  unto  you." 


CHAPTER  XIII 

IS  IT  WRONG  FOR  GOOD  PEOPLE 
TO  BE  SUCCESSFUL? 

WE  ARE  having  and  are  about  to  have  notably  and  truly 
successful  men  who  have  the  humility  and  faithfulness,  the 
spiritual  distinction  of  true  and  great  success. 

I  want  to  interpret,  if  I  can,  these  men.  I  would  like  to  put 
with  the  great  martyrs,  with  the  immortal  heroes  of  failure, 
these  modern  silent,  unspoken,  unsung  mighty  men,  the 
heroes  of  success.  I  look  forward  to  seeing  them  placed 
among  the  trophies  of  religion,  in  the  heart  of  mankind  at 
last. 

I  cannot  stand  by  and  watch  these  men  being  looked  upon  by 
good  people  as  men  the  New  Testament  made  no  room  for, 
secretly  disapproved  of  by  religious  men  and  women,  as  being 
successes,  as  being  little,  noisy,  disturbing,  contradictions  of 
the  New  Testament  —  as  talking  back  to  the  Cross. 

These  things  I  have  been  trying  to  say  about  the  Cross  as  a 
means  of  expressing  goodness  to  crowds  have  brought  me  as 
time  goes  on  into  close  quarters  with  many  men  to  whom  I  pay 
grateful  tribute,  men  of  high  spirit,  who  strenuously  disagree 
with  me. 

I  am  not  content  unless  I  can  find  common  ground  with  men 
like  these. 

They  are  wont  to  tell  me  when  we  argue  about  it  that  what- 
ever I  may  be  able  to  say  for  success  as  a  means  of  touching 
the  imaginations  of  crowds  with  goodness,  great  or  attractive 
or  enthralling  characters  are  not  produced  by  success.  Success 
does  not  produce  great  characters.     It  is  now  and  always  has 

163 


164  CROWDS 

been  failure  that  develops  the  characters  of  the  men  who  are 
truly  great. 

Perhaps  failure  is  not  the  only  way. 


When  I  was  talking  with a  httle  while  ago  about 

Non-Gregarious's  goodness  and  how  it  succeeded,  he  was 
afraid  that  if  his  goodness  succeeded  there  must  have  been 
something  the  matter  with  it. 

I  could  see  that  he  was  wondering  what  it  was. 

Non's  success  troubled  him.  He  did  not  think  it  was  exactly 
religious.  '"Real  religion"  he  said,  "was  self-sacrifice.  There 
always  had  to  be  something  of  the  Cross  about  real  religion. " 

I  said  that  Non's  religion  was  touched  at  every  point  with  the 
Cross. 

It  seemed  to  me  that  it  was  the  spirit  of  eagerness  in  it  that 
was  the  great  thing  about  the  Cross.  If  Non  would.all  but  have 
died  to  make  the  Golden  Rule  work  in  this  world,  if  he  daily 
faced  ruin  and  risked  the  loss  of  everything  he  had  in  this  life 
to  prove  that  the  Golden  Rule  was  a  success,  that  is  if  he  really 
had  a  Cross  and  if  he  really  faced  it  —  dying  on  it,  or  not  dying 
on  it,  could  not  have  made  him  one  whit  more  religious  or  less 
religious  than  he  was.  What  Non  was  willing  to  die  for,  was 
his  belief  in  the  world,  and  scores  of  good  Christian  people  tried 
in  those  early  days  of  his  business  struggle  to  keep  him  from 
believing  in  the  world.  There  was  hardly  a  day  at  first  but 
some  good  Christian  would  step  into  Non's  office  and  tell  him 
the  world  would  make  him  suffer  for  it  if  he  kept  on  recklessly 
believing  in  it  and  doing  all  those  unexpected,  unconventional, 
honest  things  that  somehow,  apparently,  he  could  not  help 
doing. 

They  all  told  him  he  could  not  succeed.  They  said  he  was  a 
failure.     He  would  suffer  for  it. 

I  would  like  to  express  if  I  can,  what  seems  to  be  Non's 
point  of  view  toward  success  and  failure. 


SHOULD  GOOD  PEOPLE  BE  SUCCESSFUL?     165 

If  Non  were  trying  to  express  his  idea  of  the  suffering  of 
Christ,  I  imagine  he  would  say  that  in  the  hardest  time  of  all 
when  his  body  was  hanging  on  the  Cross,  the  thing  that  was 
really  troubling  Christ  was  not  that  he  was  being  killed.  The 
thing  that  was  troubling  him  was  that  the  world  really  seemed, 
at  least  for  the  time  being,  the  sort  of  world  that  could  do  such 
things.  He  did  not  take  his  own  cross  too  personally  or  too 
literally  as  the  world's  permanent  or  fixed  attitude  toward 
goodness  or  every  degree  of  goodness.  There  was  a  sense  in 
which  he  did  not  believe  except  temporarily  in  his  own  cross. 
He  did  not  think  that  the  world  meant  it  or  that  it  would  ever 
own  up  that  it  meant  it. 

Probably  if  we  had  crosses  to-day  the  hard  part  of  dying  on 
one  would  be,  not  dying  on  it,  but  thinking  while  one  was  dying 
on  it  that  one  was  in  the  sort  of  world  that  could  do  such  things. 

It  is  Non's  religion  not  to  beUeve  every  morning  as  he  goes 
down  to  his  oflBce  that  he  is  in  a  mean  world,  a  world  that  would 
want  to  crucify  him  for  doing  his  work  as  well  as  he  could. 

Perhaps  this  was  the  spirit  of  the  first  Cross,  too.  We  have 
every  reason  to  believe  that  if  Christ  could  have  come  back  in  the 
flesh  three  days  after  the  crucifixion  and  lived  thirty-three 
years  longer  in  it,  he  would  have  occupied  himself  exclusively 
in  standing  up  for  the  world  that  had  crucified  him,  in  saying 
that  it  was  a  small  party  in  a  small  province  that  did  it,  that  it 
was  temporary  and  that  they  did  it  because  they  were  in  a  hurry. 

It  was  not  Cbrist,  but  the  comparatively  faint-believing, 
worldly  minded  saints  that  have  enjoyed  dying  on  crosses 
since,  who  have  been  proud  of  being  martyrs. 

Among  those  who  have  tried  the  martyr  way  of  doing  things 
Jesus  is  almost  the  only  one  who  has  not  in  his  heart  abused 
the  world.  Most  martyrs  have  made  a  kind  of  religion  out  of 
not  expecting  anything  of  it  and  of  trying  to  get  out  of  it. 
"And  ye,  all  ye  people,  are  ye  suitable  or  possible  people  for  me 
to  be  religious  with.^"  the  typical  martyr  exclaims  to  all  the 
cities,  to  all  the  inventors,  to  the  scientists  and  to  the  earth- 


166  CROWDS 

redeemers,  to  his  neighbours  and  his  fellow  men.  It  was  not 
until  science  in  the  person  of  Gallileo  came  to  the  rescue  of 
Christianity  and  began  slowly  to  bring  it  back  to  where  Christ 
started  it  —  as  a  noble,  happy  enterprise  of  standing  up  for 
this  world  and  of  asserting  that  these  men  who  were  in  it  are 
good  enough  to  be  religious  here  and  to  be  the  sons  of  God  now 
—  that  Christianity  began  to  function.  Religion  has  been 
making  apparently  a  side  trip  for  nearly  twelve  hundred  years, 
a  side  trip  into  space  or  into  the  air  or  into  the  grave  for  holiness 
for  the  eternal,  and  for  the  infinite. 

Doubtless  very  often  people  on  crosses  really  have  been 
holier  than  the  people  who  knew  how  to  be  good  without  being 
crucified.  Sometimes  it  has  been  the  other  way.  It  would 
have  been  just  as  holy  in  Non  to  make  the  gospel  work  in  New 
York  as  to  make  a  blaze,  a  show  or  advertisement  of  how 
wicked  the  world  was,  and  of  how  inefficient  the  gospel  was  — 
by  going  into  insolvency. 

He  has  had  his  cross,  but  instead  of  dying  on  it,  he  has  taken 
it  up  and  carried  it.  Scores  of  risks  and  difficulties  that 
he  has  grappled  with  would  have  become  crosses  at  once  if 
equally  good,  but  less  resourceful  men,  had  had  them.  Letting 
one's  self  be  threatened  with  the  cross  a  thousand  times  is 
quite  as  brave  as  dying  on  one  once.  The  spirit,  or  at  least 
the  shadow,  of  a  cross  must  always  fall  daily  on  any  life  that  is 
stretchingthe  world,  that  is  freeing  the  lives  of  other  men  against 
their  wills.  The  whole  issue  of  whether  there  will  be  a  cross  or  th< 
threat  of  a  cross  turns  on  a  man's  insight  into  human  nature  and 
his  quiet  and  practical  imagination  concentrated  upon  his  work. 

Not  dying  on  a  cross  is  a  matter  of  technique.  One  sees  how 
not  to,  and  one  does  not.  It  might  be  said  that  the  world  has 
two  kinds  of  redeemers,  its  cross-redeemers  and  its  success- 
redeemers.  The  very  best  are  on  crosses,  many  of  them. 
Perhaps  in  the  development  of  the  truth  the  cross-redeemers 
come  first;  they  are  the  pioneers.  Then  come  the  success- 
redeemers,  then  everybody ! 


CHAPTER  XIV 

IS  IT  SECOND  RATE  FOR  GOOD  PEOPLE 
TO  BE  SUCCESSFUL? 

OF  COURSE  the  most  stupendous  success  that  has  ever  been 
made  —  the  world's  most  successful  undertaking  from  a  techni- 
cal point  of  view  as  an  adaptation  of  means  to  ends  was  the 
attempt  that  w  as  made  by  a  man  in  Galilee  years  and  years  ago 
to  get  not  only  the  attention  of  a  whole  world,  but  to  get  the 
attention  of  a  whole  world  for  two  thousand  years. 

This  purpose  of  arresting  the  attention  of  a  world  and  of 
holding  it  for  two  thousand  years  was  accomplished  by  the  use 
of  success  and  of  failure  alternately. 

Christ  tried  success  or  failure  according  to  which  method 
(time  and  place  considered)  would  seem  to  work  best. 

His  first  success  was  with  the  doctors. 

His  next  success  was  based  on  His  instinct  for  psychology. 
His  power  of  divining  people's  minds,  which  made  possible  to 
Him  those  extraordinary  feats  in  the  way  of  telling  short  stories 
that  would  arrest  and  hold  the  attention  of  crowds  so  that  they 
would  think  and  live  with  them  for  weeks  to  come. 

His  next  success  was  a  success  based  on  the  power  of  His 
personality,  and  His  knowledge  of  the  human  spirit  and  his 
victory  over  His  own  spirit  —  his  success  in  curing  people's 
diseases  and  His  extraordinary  roll  of  miracles. 

He  finally  tried  failure  at  the  end,  or  what  looked  like  failure, 
because  the  Cross  completed  what  he  had  had  to  say. 

It  made  His  success  seem  greater. 

The  world  had  put  to  death  the  man  who  had  had  such 
great  successes. 

19" 


168  CROWDS 

People  thought  of  His  successes  when  they  thought  of  Him 
on  the  Cross,  and  they  have  kept  thinking  of  them  for  thou- 
sands of  years. 

But  the  Cross  itself,  or  the  use  of  failure  was  a  sowing  of  the 
seed,  a  taking  the  truth  out  of  the  light  and  the  sunshine  and 
putting  it  in  the  dark  ground. 

The  Cross  was  promptly  contradicted  with  the  Resurrection. 

All  this,  it  seems  to  some  of  us,  is  the  most  stupendous  and 
successful  undertaking  from  a  purely  technical  point  of  view 
that  the  world  has  seen.  In  the  last  analysis  it  was  not  His 
ideas  or  His  character  merely,  but  it  was  His  technique  that 
made  Christ  the  Son  of  God  and  the  Master  of  the  Nations 
of  the  Earth. 


I  think  that  while  Christ  would  not  have  understood  Fred- 
crick  Taylor's  technique,  his  tables  of  figures  or  foot -tons  or 
logarithms  he  would  have  understood  Frederick  Taylor. 

Nearly  all  the  time  that  could  be  said  to  have  been  spent  in 
his  life  in  dealing  with  other  men  he  spent  in  doing  for  them  on  a 
nobler  scale  the  thing  that  Frederick  Taylor  did.  He  went  up 
to  men  —  to  hundreds  of  men  a  day,  that  he  saw  humdrumming 
along,  despising  themselves  and  despising  their  work  and 
expecting  nothing  of  themselves  and  nothing  of  any  one  else  and 
asked  them  to  put  their  lives  in  his  hands  and  let  him  show  what 
could  be  done  with  them. 

This  is  Frederick  Taylor's  profession. 

The  Sermon  on  the  Mount  began  with  telling  people  that 
they  would  be  successful  if  they  knew  how  —  if  they  had  a 
vision.  It  proceeded  to  give  them  the  vision.  It  began  with 
giving  them  a  vision  for  the  things  that  they  had,  told  them 
how  even  the  very  things  that  they  had  always  thought  before 
were  what  was  the  matter  with  the  world  they  could  make  a 
great  use  of.  "Blessed  are  the  peacemakers.  Blessed  are 
those  that  hunger;  blessed  are  th,e  meek. " 


IS  IT  SECOND  RATE  TO  BE  SUCCESSFUL?    169 

And  He  then  went  on  to  tell  them  how  much  finer,  and  nobler 
and  more  free  from  the  cares  and  weights  of  this  earth 
they  could  be  if  they  wanted  to  be,  than  they  had 
dared  to  beheve.  He  told  the  people  who  were  around 
Him  bigger  things  about  human  nature,  how  successful  it  was 
or  could  be  than  any  one  had  ever  claimed  for  people  in  this 
world  before.  They  put  Him  up  on  a  Cross  at  last  and  crucified 
Him  because  they  thought  He  was  too  hopeful  about  them, 
and  about  human  nature  or  because,  as  they  would  have  put  it. 
He  was  blasphemous  and  said  every  man  was  a  Son  of  God. 

As  human  nature  then  was  and  in  the  then  spirit  of  the  world, 
no  better  means  than  a  Cross  could  have  been  employed  to  get 
the  attention  of  all  men,  to  make  a  two  thousand  year  advertise- 
ment for  all  nations  of  what  a  success  human  nature  was,  of 
what  men  really  could  be  like. 

But  I  think  that  if  Christ  were  to  come  to  us  again  and  if  he 
were  to  try  to  get  the  attention  of  the  whole  world  once  more 
to  precisely  the  same  ideas  and  principles  that  he  stood  for 
before,  the  enterprise  would  be  conducted  in  a  very  different 
manner. 

There  is  a  picture  of  Albert  Durer's  which  hangs  near  my 
desk,  and  once  more  as  I  write  these  lines  my  eyes  have 
fallen  on  it.  It  is  the  familiar  one  with  the  lion  and  the  lamb 
in  it,  lying  down  together,  and  with  the  big  room  with  the 
implements  of  knowledge  scattered  about  in  it  and  at  the  other 
end  in  the  window  at  the  table  with  a  book,  an  old,  bent-over 
scientist  with  a  halo  over  his  head. 

If  Christ  were  to  appear  suddenly  in  this  modem  world  to- 
morrow, the  first  thing  He  would  see  and  would  go  toward, 
would  be  the  halo  over  the  scientist's  head. 

There  is  nothing  especially  picturesque  or  religious  looking, 
nothing,  at  least,  that  could  be  put  in  a  stained-glass  window 
in  Frederick  Taylor's  tables  and  charts  and  diagrams  of  the 
number  of  foot-tons  a  pig-iron  handler  can  lift  with  his  arms 
in  a  day 


170  CROWDS 

But  if  Christ  returned  to  the  world  to-morrow  and  if  what 
He  wanted  to  do  to-morrow  was  to  get  the  universal,  profound, 
convinced  attention  of  all  men  to  the  Golden  Rule,  I  believe 
He  would  begin  the  way  Frederick  Taylor  did,  by  —  being 
concrete.  If  He  wanted  to  get  men  in  general,  men  in  busi- 
ness, to  love  one  another  He  would  begin  by  trying  to  work 
out  some  technical,  practical  way  in  which  certain  particular 
men  in  a  certain  particular  place  could  afford  to  love  one 
another. 

He  would  find  a  practical  way  for  instance  for  the  employers 
and  pig-iron  handlers  in  the  Midvale  Steel  Works  to  come  to 
some  sort  of  common  understanding  and  to  work  cheerfully 
and  with  a  free  spirit  together.  I  think  he  would  proceed  very 
much  in  the  way  that  Frederick  Taylor  did. 

He  would  not  say  much  about  the  Golden  Rule.  He  wouid 
give  each  man  a  vision  for  his  work,  and  of  the  way  it  lapped 
over  into  other  men's  work  and  leave  the  Golden  Rule  a  chance 
to  take  care  of  itself.  This  is  all  the  Golden  Rule,  as  a  truth 
or  as  a  remark  needs  just  now. 

For  two  thousand  years  men  have  devoted  themselves  Sun- 
day after  Sunday  to  saying  over  and  over  again  that  men  should 
love  one  another.  The  idea  is  a  perfectly  famihar  one.  When 
Christ  said  it  two  thousand  years  ago,  it  was  so  original  and  so 
sensational  that  just  of  itself  and  as  a  mere  remark  it  had  a 
carrying  power  over  the  whole  earth. 

Everybody  believes  it  now  —  that  it  is  a  true  remark  —  but 
like  a  score  of  other  remarks  that  have. been  made  and  some 
of  the  noblest  Christ  made,  is  it  not  possible  that  it  has  long 
since  in  its  mere  capacity  of  being  a  remark,  gone  by?  There 
is  no  one  who  has  not  heard  about  our  loving  one  another. 
The  remark  we  want  now  is  how  we  can  do  it.  This  is  thr 
remark  that  ]\Ir.  Frederick  Taylor  has  made.  It  is  not  a  cry 
eloquent.  It  is  a  mere  statement  of  fact.  It  has  taken  him 
nearly  thirty-three  years  to  make  it. 

The  gist  of  it  is  that  for  thirty-three  years,  the  employers  and 


.      IS  IT  SECOND  RATE  TO  BE  SUCCESSFUL?    171 

the  pig-iron  handlers  in  the  Midvale  Steel  Works,  Pennsylvania, 
have  been  devoted  to  one  another  and  to  one  another's  interests 
and  acting  all  day  every  day  as  if  of  course  their  interests 
were  the  same,  and  it  has  been  found  that  employees  when  their 
employers  cooperated  with  them  could  lift  forty-seven  tons 
instead  of  twelve  and  a  half  a  day,  and  were  getting  60  per 
cent  more  wages. 

Everybody  Ustens.  Everybody  sees  at  a  glance  that  when  it 
comes  to  making  remarks  about  doing  as  one  would  be  done  by, 
this  is  the  one  remark  that  we  have  all  been  waiting  to  hear 
some  one  make  for  two  thousand  years. 


The  Cross  or  the  last-resort  type  of  religion  was  as  far  as 
St.  Augustine  or  St.  Francis  in  their  world  could  get.  It  was 
all  that  the  Middle  Ages  were  ready  for  or  that  could  be  claimed 
for  people  who  had  to  live  in  ages  without  a  printing  press, 
in  which  no  one  in  the  crowd  could  expect  to  know  any- 
thing and  in  which  there  were  no  ways  of  letting  crowds  know 
things. 

To-day  there  is  no  reason  why  the  Cross  as  a  contrivance 
for  attracting  the  attention  of  all  people  to  goodness  should 
be  exclusively  relied  upon. 

Possibly  the  Cross  was  intended,  at  the  time,  as  the 
best  possible  way  of  starting  a  religion,  when  there  w-as 
none,  or  possibly  for  keeping  it  up  when  there  was  very  little 
of  it. 

But  now  that  Christianity  has  been  occupied  two  thousand 
years  in  putting  in  the  groundwork,  in  laying  down  the  princi- 
ples of  success,  and  in  organizing  them  into  the  world,  has  been 
slowly  making  it  possible  with  crowds  that  could  not  be  long 
deceived  for  success  to  be  decent.  The  leaven  has  worked  into 
human  nature  and  Christianity  has  produced  The  Successful 
Temperament. 

Success  has  become  a  spiritual  institution.     In  other  words. 


172  CROWDS 

the  hour  of  the  Scientist,  of  the  man  with  a  technique,  of  the 
man  who  sees  how,  the  man  of  The  Successful  Temperament  is 
at  hand. 

Everything  we  plan  for  the  world,  including  goodness,  from 
this  day  —  must  reckon  with  him  —  with  the  Man  Who 
Sees  How. 


CHAPTER  XV 
THE  SUCCESSFUL  TEMPERAMENT 

I  ALSO,  Gentle  Reader,  have  despised  and  do  despise 
"success." 

I  also  have  stood,  like  you,  perhaps,  and  I  am  standing  now 
in  that  ancient,  outer  court,  where  I  can  keep  seeing  every  day 
The  Little  Great  Men  with  all  their  funny  trappings  on,  —  their 
hoods,  and  their  ribbons,  and  their  train-bearers,  drive  up  before 
us  all  and  go  in  to  The  Great  Door.  I  have  gone  by  in  the  night 
and  have  heard  the  buzz  of  their  voices  there.  I  have  looked, 
like  you,  up  at  the  great  lighted  windows  of  Prosperity  from 
the  street. 

And  in  the  broad  dayhght  I  have  seen  them  too.  I  have 
stood  on  the  curb  in  the  public  way  with  all  the  others  and 
watched  silently  the  parade  of  The  Little  Great  go  by. 

I  have  waited  like  you,  Gentle  Reader,  and  smiled  or  I  have 
turned  on  my  heel  sadly,  or  wearily  or  bitterly  or  gayly  and 
walked  away  down  my  own  side  street  of  the  world  and  with 
the  huzzahs  of  the  crowd  echoing  faintly  in  my  ears  have  gone 
my  way. 

But  I  keep  coming  back  to  the  curb  again. 

I  keep  coming  back  because,  every  now  and  then  among  all 
the  gilt  carriages  and  the  bowing  faces  in  them,  or  among  all  the 
big  yellow  vans  or  cages  with  the  great  beasts  of  success  in  them, 
the  literary  foxes,  the  journaUst- juggernauts,  the  Jack  Johnsons 
of  finance,  the  contented,  gurgling,  wallowing  milhonaires  — 
I  cannot  help  standing  once  more  and  looking  among  them, 
for  one,  or  for  possibly  two,  or  three  or  four  who  may  be  truly 
successful  men.     Some  of  them  are  merely  successful-looking. 

173 


174  CROWDS 

I  often  find  as  I  see  them  more  closely,  that  they  are  undeceived, 
or  humble,  or  are  at  least  not  being  any  more  successful-looking 
than  they  can  help,  and  are  trying  to  do  better. 

They  are  the  men  who  have  defied  success  to  succeed  and 
who  will  defy  it  again  and  again. 

They  are  the  great  men. 

The  great  man  is  the  man  who  can  get  himself  made  and  who 
will  get  himself  made  out  of  anything  he  finds  at  hand. 

If  success  cannot  do  it,  he  makes  failure  do  it.  If  he* cannot 
make  success  express  the  greatness  or  the  vision  that  is  in  him, 
he  makes  failure  express  it. 

But  this  book  is  not  about  great  men  and  goodness.  It  is 
about  touching  the  imagination  of  crowds  with  goodness,  about 
making  goodness  democratic  and  making  goodness  available 
for  common  people. 


A  stupendous  success  in  goodness  will  advertise  it  as  well  as 
a  stupendous  failure. 

Goodness  has  had  its  cross-redeemers  to  attract  the  attention 
of  half  a  world. 

Possibly  it  is  having  now  its  success-redeemers  to  attract 
the  attention  of  the  other  half. 

The  people  the  success-redeemers  reach  would  turn  out  to  be, 
possibly,  very  much  more  than  half. 

The  Cross,  as  a  means  of  getting  the  attention  of  crowds,  or 
of  the  more  common  people  in  our  modern,  practical-minded 
Western  world,  was  apparently  adapted  to  its  purpose  as  long 
as  it  was  used  for  church  purposes  or  as  long  as  it  was  kept 
dramatic  or  sensational  or  remote,  or  as  long  as  it  was  a  cross 
for  some  one  else,  but  as  a  means  of  attracting  the  attention  of 
crowds  of  ordinary  men  and  women  to  goodness  in  common 
everyday  things,  it  is  very  doubtful  if  failure  —  in  the  power 
of  steady  daily  pulling  on  men's  minds,  has  done  as  much  for 
goodness  as  success. 


THE  SUCCESSFUL  TEMPERAMENT  175 

It  is  doubtful  if,  except  as  an  ideal  or  conventional  symbol 
the  cross  has  ever  been  or  ever  could  be  what  might  be  called 
a  spiritually  middle-class  institution.  It  has  been  reserved 
for  men  of  genius,  pioneers  and  world-designers  to  have  those 
colossal  and  glorious  crosses  that  have  been  worshipped  in  all 
ages,  and  must  be  worshipped  in  all  ages  as  the  great  memorials 
of  the  human  race. 

But  the  more  common  and  numerous  types  of  men,  the  men 
who  do  .not  design  worlds,  but  who  execute  them,  build  them, 
who  carry  the  new  designs  of  goodness  out,  who  work  through 
the  details  and  conceive  the  technique  of  goodness  are  men  in 
whom  the  spiritual  and  religious  power  takes  the  natural  form 
of  success. 

It  seems  to  be  the  nature  of  the  modern  and  the  western  type 
of  man  to  challenge  fatalism,  to  defy  a  cross.  He  would  almost 
boast  that  nobody  could  make  him  die  on  it.  This  spirit  in 
men  too  is  a  religious  spirit.  It  is  the  next  hail  of  goodness. 
Goodness   posts    up     its    next    huge     notice    on    the    world: 


SUCCESS 


It  is  going  to  make  the  more  rudimentary  everyday  people 
notice  it,  and  it  is  going  to  make  them  notice  it  in  everyday 
things.  It  does  not  admit  that  goodness  is  merely  for  the 
spiritual  aristocrats  for  those  greater  souls  that  can  search 
out  and  appreciate  the  spiritual  values  in  failure. 

It  believes  that  goodness  is  for  crowds.  It  has  discovered 
that  crosses,  to  common  people  in  common  things,  seem  oriental 
and  mystical.  The  common  people  of  the  western  world  instead 
of  being  born  with  dreamy  imaginations  are  born  with  pointed 
and  applied  ones.  It  is  not  impossible  that  the  comparative 
failure  of  the  Christian  religion  in  the  western  world  and  in  the 
later  generations  is  that  it  has  been  trjnng  to  be  oriental  and 
aristocratic  in  appealing  to  what  is  really  a  new  type  of  man 


176  CROWDS 

in  the  world  —  the  scientific  and  practical  type  as  we  see  it 
in  the  western  nations  all  about  us  to-day. 

We  can  die  on  crosses  in  our  Western  world  as  well  as  any  one 
and  we  can  do  it  in  crowds  too  as  they  do  in  India,  but  we 
propose  if  crosses  are  expected  of  us  to  know  why  in  crowds. 
Knowing  why  makes  us  think  of  things  and  makes  us  do  things. 
It  is  the  keynote  of  our  temperament. 

And  it  is  not  fair  to  say  of  us  when  we  make  this  distinction 
that  we  do  not  believe  in  the  cross.  But  there  are  times  when 
some  of  us  wish  that  we  could  get  other  people  to  stop  believing 
in  it.  We  would  all  but  die  on  the  cross  to  get  other  people  to 
stop  dying  on  one  for  platitudes,  to  get  them  to  work  their  way 
down  to  the  facts  and  focus  their  minds  on  the  practical  details 
of  not  dying  on  a  cross,  of  forming  a  vision  of  action  which  will 
work.  It  goes  without  saying  that  as  long  as  crowds  are  in  the 
world  crosses  will  not  go  by,  but  it  is  wicked  not  to  make  them 
go  by  as  fast  as  possible,  one  by  one.  They  were  meant  to  be 
moved  up  higher.  We  are  eager  not  to  die  on  the  same  cross 
for  the  same  thing  year  after  year  and  century  after  century. 
It  seems  to  us  that  the  eagerness  that  always  goes  with  the 
cross  always  was  and  always  will  be  the  essential,  powerful  and 
beautiful  thing  in  it. 

And  it  is  this  new  eagerness  in  the  modern  spirit,  a  kind  of 
hurrying  up  of  the  souls  of  the  world  that  is  inspiring  us  to 
employ  our  western  genius  in  inventing  and  defending  and 
applying  the  means  of  goodness  and  in  finding  ways  of  making 
goodness  work.  We  will  not  admit  that  men  were  intended 
to  die  on  crosses  from  a  sheer,  beautiful,  heavenly  shiftlessness, 
vague-mindedness,  mere  unwillingness  to  take  pains  to  express 
themselves  or  unwillingness  to  think  things  out  and  to  make 
things  plain  to  crowds.  It  does  not  seem  to  us  that  it 
is  wicked  to  employ  success  as  well  as  failure,  to  state  our 
religion  to  people.  It  seems  to  us  that  it  goes  naturally  with  the 
scientific  and  technical  temperament  of  the  people  that  we 
should  do  this.     It  is  not  superior  and  it  is  not  inferior.     It  is 


THE  SUCCESSFUL  TEMPERAMENT  177 

temperamental  and  it  is  based  upon  the  study  of  the  psychology 
of  attention,  on  a  knowledge  of  what  impresses  a  certain  kind 
of  man  and  of  what  really  is  conclusive  with  crowds  and  with 
average  men  and  women.  It  is  the  distinctive  point  of  view  of 
the  pragmatic  temperament,  of  the  inductive  mind.  The 
modern  mind  is  interested  in  facts  and  cannot  make  a  religion 
out  of  not  knowing  them.  There  was  a  time  once  when  people 
used  to  take  their  bodily  diseases  as  acts  of  God.  We  have 
made  up  our  minds  not  to  have  these  same  bodily  diseases 
now.  We  have  discovered  by  hard  work  and  constant  study 
that  they  are  not  necessary.  The  sarae  is  true  of  our  moral  dis- 
eases and  of  our  great  social  maladies. 

It  is  going  to  be  the  same  with  crosses.  It  is  a  sin  and  a 
slander  and  affront  to  human  nature  and  to  God  to  die  on  a 
cross  if  it  can  be  helped  by  hard  work  and  close  thinking,  or  by 
touching  the  imaginations  of  others. 

Most  of  us  acting  in  most  things  are  not  good  enough  to  die 
on  crosses.  We  are  not  worthy,  it  would  not  be  humble  in  us 
to.  Crosses  are  only  reserved  for  the  newest  and  most  rare 
truths,  and  for  the  newest  and  most  rare  men.  They  are  still, 
and  they  still  can  be  made  to  be,  a  means  of  grace  and  of  per- 
fection to  people  who  have  gifts  of  learning  things  by  suffering, 
but  as  a  means  of  making  other  people  and  people  in  crowds  see 
things,  the  right  to  use  a  cross  is  not  for  those  of  us  who  are 
merely  lumbering  spiritually  along,  trying  to  catch  up  to  a 
plain,  simple-hearted  old  platitude,  eighteen  hundred  years 
late  Uke  the  Golden  Rule.  The  right  to  a  cross  is  reserved  for 
those  who  are  up  on  the  higher  reaches,  those  great  bleak 
stretches  or  moors  of  truth  where  men  go  forth  and  walk 
alone  with  God  hundreds  of  years  ahead. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
THE  MEN  AHEAD  PULL 

WRITING  a  hopeful  book  about  the  human  race  with  the 
New  York  Sun,  Wall  Street,  Downing  Street  and  Bernard 
Shaw  looking  on  is  uphill  work. 

Sometimes  I  wish  there  were  another  human  race  I  could 
refer  to  when  I  am  writing  about  this  one,  one  every  one  knows. 
The  one  on  Mars,  for  instance,  if  one  could  calmly  point  to  it 
in  the  middle  of  an  argument,  shut  people  off  with  a  wave  of 
one's  hand  and  say,  "Mars  this"  and  "  Mars  that"  would  be 
convenient. 

The  trouble  with  the  human  race  is  that  when  one  is  talking 
to  it  about  itself,  it  thinks  it  is  It. 

It  is  not  It  yet. 

The  earth  and  everything  on  it  is  a  huee  Acorn,  tumbUng 
softly  through  the  sky. 

Our  boasted  Christianity  (crosses,  and  resurrections  and 
cathedrals  and  all)  is  a  Child  crying  in  the  night. 


It  is  not  necessary  for  me  to  prove  to  the  satisfaction  of  the 
New  York  Sun  and  Bernard  Shaw  that  the  Golden  Rule  has 
not  reached  the  superior  moral  stage  of  being  taken  as  a  plati- 
tude by  all  of  our  people  who  are  engaged  in  business.  It  is 
enough  to  submit  that  the  most  creative  and  forceful  business 
men  —  the  men  who  set  the  pace,  the  foremen  of  the  world,  are 
taking  it  so,  and  that  others  are  trying  to  be  as  much  like  them 
as  they  can.  Wickedness  in  this  world  is  not  going  to  stop  with 
a  jerk.     It  is  merely  being  better  distributed.     Possibly  this  is 

178 


THE  MEN  AHEAD  PULL  179 

all  there  is  to  the  problem,  getting  sin  better  distributed. 
The  Devil  has  never  had  a  very  great  outfit  or  any  great  weight, 
but  he  has  always  known  where  to  throw  it,  and  he  has  always 
done  an  immense  business  on  a  small  capital  and  the  only  way 
he  has  managed  to  get  on  at  all,  is  by  organizing,  and  by 
getting  the  attention  of  a  few  people  at  the  top.  Now  that  the 
moral  sense  of  the  world  has  become  quickened,  and  that 
rapid  transit  and  newspapers  and  science  and  the  fact-spirit 
have  gained  their  hold,  the  sins  of  the  world  are  being  rapidly 
distributed,  not  so  much  among  the  men  who  determine  things 
as  among  those  who  cannot. 

Everything  is  following  the  fact-spirit.  The  modern  world 
and  everything  in  it,  is  falling  into  the  hands  of  the  men  who 
cannot  be  cheated  about  facts,  who  get  the  facts  first  and 
who  get  them  right. 

The  world  cannot  help  falling,  from  now  on,  slowly  —  a  little 
ponderously  perhaps  at  first  —  into  the  hands  of  good  men. 
To  say  that  the  world  is  falling  into  the  hands  of  men  who 
cannot  be  cheated  and  to  say  that  it  is  falHng  into  the  hands  of 
good  men  is  to  say  the  same  thing. 

The  men  who  get  the  things  that  they  want,  get  them  by 
seeing  the  things  as  they  are.  Goodness  and  efficiency  both 
boil  down  to  the  same  quality  in  the  modern  man,  his  faculty 
for  not  being  a  romantic  person  and  for  not  being  cheated. 

A  good  man  may  be  said  to  be  a  man  who  has  formed  ahabit, 
an  intimate  personal  habit  of  not  being  cheated.  Everything 
he  does  is  full  of  this  habit.  The  sinful  man,  as  he  is  usually 
called,  is  a  man  who  is  off  in  his  facts,  a  man  who  does  not  know 
what-  he  really  wants  even  for  himself.  In  a  matter-of-fact 
civilization  like  ours,  he  cannot  hope  to  keep  up.  If  a  man  can 
be  cheated,  even,  by  himself  —  of  course  other  people  can  cheat 
him  and  everybody  can  take  advantage  of  him.  He  naturally 
grows  more  incompetent  every  day  he  lives.  The  men  who  are 
slow  or  inefiicient  in  finding  out  what  they  really  want  and  slow 
in  dealing  with  themselves  are  necessarily  inefficient  and  behind 


180  CROWDS 

hand  in  dealing  with  other  people.  They  cannot  be  men  who 
determine  what  other  people  shall  do. 

It  is  true  that  for  the  moment,  it  still  seems  —  now  that 
science  has  only  just  come  to  the  rescue  of  rehgion,  that  evil 
men  in  a  large  degree  are  the  men  who  still  are  standing  in  the 
gate  and  determining  opportunities  and  letting  in  and  letting 
out  Civilization  as  they  please.     But  their  time  is  limited. 

The  fact-spirit  is  in  the  people.  We  enjoy  facts.  Facts  are 
the  modern  man's  hunting,  his  adventure  and  sport.  The  men 
who  are  ahead  are  getting  into  a  kind  of  two-and-two-are-four 
habit  that  is  hke  music,  like  rhythm.  It  becomes  almost  a 
passion,  almost  a  self-indulgence  in  their  lives.  Being  honest 
with  things,  having  a  distaste  for  being  cheated  by  things, 
having  a  distaste  for  being  cheated  by  one's  self  and  for  cheating 
other  people,  runs  in  the  blood  in  modern  men.  The  nations 
can  be  seen  going  round  and  round  the  earth  and  looking  one 
another  long  and  earnestly  in  the  eyes.  The  poet  is  turning 
his  imagination  upon  the  world  about  him  and  upon  the  fact 
that  really  works  in  it.  The  scientific  man  has  taken  hold  of 
religion  and  righteousness  is  being  proved,  melted  down  in  the 
laboratory,  welded  together  before  us  all  and  riveted  on  to 
the  every  day,  on  to  what  really  happens,  and  on  to  what  really 
works.  Goodness  in  its  baser  form  already  pays.  Only  the 
biggest  men  may  have  found  it  out,  but  everybody  is  watching 
them.  The  most  important  spiritual  service  that  any  man  can 
render  the  present  age  is  to  make  goodness  pay  at  the  top 
(in  the  most  noticeable  place)  in  some  business  where  nobody 
has  made  it  pay  before.  Anybody  can  see  that  it  almost  pays 
already,  that  it  pays  now  here,  now  there.  At  all  events,  any- 
body can  see  that  it  is  very  noticeable  that  the  part  of  the  world 
that  is  most  spiritual  is  not  merely  the  part  that  is  whining  or 
hanging  on  crosses.  It  is  also  the  part  that  is  successful.  One 
knows  scores  of  saints  with  ruddy  cheeks.  It  is  getting  to  be 
a  matter  of  principle  almost  in  a  modern  saint  —  to  have  ruddy 
cheeks. 


THE  MEN  AHEAD  PULL  181 

I  submit  this  fact  respectfully  to  Bernard  Shaw,  Wall  Street, 
Downing  Street  and  Pennsylvania  Avenue,  and  even  to  the 
New  York  Sun,  that  vast  machine  for  laughing  at  a  world  down 
in  its  snug  quarters  in  Park  Row  —  that  the  saint  with 
ruddy  cheeks  is  a  totally  new  and  disconcerting  fact  in  our 
modem  life.  He  is  the  next  fact  the  honest  pessimist  will 
have  to  face. 

I  submit  that  this  saint  with  ruddy  cheeks  is  here,  that  he  is 
lovable,  imperturbable,  imperious,  irrepressible,  as  interesting 
as  sin,  as  catching  as  the  Devil  and  that  he  has  come  to  stay. 

He  stays  because  he  is  successful  and  can  afford  to  stay. 

He  is  successful  because  he  is  good. 

Only  religion  works. 

I  am  aware  that  the  New  York  Sun  might  quarrel  with  just 
exactly  this  way  of  putting  it. 

I  might  put  it  another  way  or  possibly  try  to  say  it  again 
after  saying  something  else  first.  Viz.:  The  man  who  is 
successful  in  business  is  the  man  who  can  get  people  to  do  as 
much  as  they  can  do  and  a  great  deal  more  than  they  think 
they  can  do. 

Only  a  very  lively  goodness,  almost  a  religion  in  a  man,  can 
do  this.  He  has  to  have  something  in  him  very  like  the  power 
of  inventing  people  or  of  making  people  over. 

To  be  specific:  In  some  big  department  stores,  as  one  goes 
down  the  aisle,  one  will  see  over  and  over  again  the  clerks 
making  fun  of  customers. 

One  by  one  the  customers  find  it  out  and  the  more  permanent 
ones,  those  who  would  keep  coming  and  who  have  the  best 
trade,  go  to  other  stores. 

How  could  such  a  thing  be  stopped  in  a  department  store  by 
a  practical  employer.''  Can  he  stop  it  successfully  by  turning 
on  his  politeness? 

Of  course  he  can  make  his  clerks  polite-looking  by  turning 
on  his  politeness.  But  politeness  in  a  department  store  does  not 
consist  in  being  polite-looking.     Being  polite-looking  does  not 


182  CROWDS 

work,  does  not  grip  the  customer  or  strike  in  and  do  things  and 
make  the  customer  do  things. 

A  machine  hke  a  department  store,  made  up  of  twenty-five 
hundred  human  beings,  which  is  carving  out  its  will,  its  nature, 
stamping  its  pattern  on  a  city,  on  a  million  men,  or  on  a  nation, 
cannot  be  made  to  work  without  religion.  If  the  clerks  are 
making  fun  of  people,  only  religion  can  stop  it. 

Perhaps  you  have  been  made  fun  of  yourself.  Gentle  Reader? 
You  have  observed,  perhaps,  that  in  making  fun  of  people 
(making  fun  of  you,  for  instance),  the  assumption  almost 
always  is,  that  you  are  trying  to  be  like  the  Standard  Person, 
and  that  this  (they  look  at  you  pleasantly  as  you  go  by)  is 
as  near  as  you  can  get  to  it !  If  an  employer  wishes  to  make  his 
clerk  an  especially  valuable  clerk,  if  he  wishes  to  make  his  clerk 
an  expert  in  human  nature  or  a  good  salesman,  one  who  sees 
a  customer  when  he  comes  along  as  he  really  is,  and  as  he  is 
trying  to  be,  he  will  only  be  able  to  do  it  by  touching  something 
deep  down  in  the  clerk's  nature,  something  very  like  his  religion 
—  his  power  of  putting  himself  in  the  place  of  others.  He  can 
only  do  it  by  making  a  clerk  feel  that  this  power  in  him  of  doing 
as  he  would  be  done  by,  and  seeing  how  to  do  it,  i.e.,  the  religion 
in  him,  is  what  he  is  hired  for. 

It  is  visionary  to  try  to  run  a  great  department  store,  a  great 
machine  of  twenty-five  hundred  souls,  a  machine  of  human 
emotions,  of  five  thousand  eyes  and  ears,  a  huge  loom  of  enthusi- 
asm, of  love,  hate,  covetousness,  sorrow,  disappointment,  and 
joy  without  having  it  full  of  clerks  who  are  experts  in  human 
nature,  putting  themselves  in  the  place  of  crowds  of  other 
people,  clerks  who  are  essentially  religious. 

So  we  watch  the  men  who  are  ahead  driving  one  another  into 
goodness.  The  man  who  is  not  able  to  create,  distribute  or 
turn  on,  in  his  business  establishment,  goodness,  social  insight, 
and  customer-insight  in  it,  can  only  hope  to-day  to  keep  ahead 
in  business  by  having  competitors  as  inefficient  as  he  is. 

The  man  who  is  ahead  has  discovered  himself.     Everything 


THE  MEN  AHEAD  PULL  l83 

the  man  ahead  is  doing  eight  hours  a  day,  is  seen  at  last  narrow- 
ing him  down,  cornering  him  into  goodness. 

Of  course  as  long  as  people  looked  upon  goodness  as  a 
Sunday  affair,  a  few  hours  a  week  put  in  on  it,  we  were 
naturally  discouraged  about  it. 

It  is  still  a  little  too  fresh  looking  and  it  may  be  still  a  little 
too  clever  for  everybody,  but  slowly,  irrevocably,  we  see  it 
coming.  We  can  look  up  almost  any  day  and  watch  some 
goodness  —  now  —  at  least  one  specimen  or  so,  in  every  branch 
of  business. 

We  watch  daily  the  men  who  are  ahead,  pulling  on  the 
goodness  of  the  world  and  the  Crowds  pushing  oa  it. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
THE  CROWDS  PUSH 

THE  men  who  are  ahead  make  goodness  start,  but  it  is  the 
crowds  that  make  it  irresistible. 

The  final,  slow,  long,  imperious  lift  on  goodness  is  the  one 
the  crowd  gives.  Of  course,  for  the  most  part,  modern  business 
is  largely  done  witk  crowds.  Crowds  are  doing  it  and  crowds 
are  nearly  always  watching  it. 

The  factory  is  slower  than  the  department  store  in  being 
good  because  the  men  in  it  deal  with  crowds  of  things  and 
crowds  of  wheels  and  not  with  crowds  of  people. 

All  responsible  people  are  forced  to  be  good,  with  crowds 
around  them,  expecting  it  of  them. 

Crowds  at  the  very  least  are  a  kind  of  vast,  insinuating, 
penetrating,  omnipresent,  permeating  police  force  of  right- 
eousness. 

In  a  department  store,  the  crowds,  twelve  thousand  a  day, 
are  like  some  huge  coil  of  hose  or  vacuum  cleaner,  lying  about 
the  place,  sucking  up,  drawing  out,  and  demanding  goodness 
from  the  clerks.  Clerks  develop  human  insight  and  powers 
faster  in  department  stores  than  machinists  do  in  factories 
because  they  are  exposed  to  more  people  and  to  larger  crowds. 
The  stream  clears  itself. 

The  last  forms  of  business  to  yield  to  the  new  spirit  are  to  be 
the  lonely  ones,  the  ones  where  light,  air,  human  emotions,  and 
crowds  are  shut  out. 

The  lonely  forms  of  business  will  at  last  be  vitalized  and 
socialized  by  men  of  organizing  genius,  who  will  invent  the 
equivalent  of  crowds  going  by,  who  will  contrive  ways  of  putting 

184 


THE  CROWDS  PUSH  185 

a  few  responsible  persons  in  sight  or  in  a  position  where  they 
will  feel  crowds  going  by  their  souls,  looking  into  them  as  if  they 
were  shop  windows.  Crowds  can  keep  track  of  a  few.  The 
crowds  will  see  that  these  few  are  the  kind  of  men  who  will  keep 
track  of  all. 

Crowds  in  the  end  will  not  accept  less  than  the  best.  With 
crowds  of  people  and  crowds  of  places  and  crowds  of  times  we 
are  good.  In  all  things  crowds  can  see  or  be  made  to  see  we  are 
safe.  Progress  lies  in  making  crowds  see  through  people, 
making  crowds  go  past  them.  While  they  are  going  past  them, 
they  lure  their  goodness  on. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW,  SAYS  HOW 

THE  people  who  are  worried  and  discouraged  about  goodness 
in  this  world,  one  finds  when  one  studies  them  a  little,  are 
almost  always  worried  in  a  kind  of  general  way.  They  do  not 
worry  about  anything  in  particular.  Their  religion  seems  to 
be  a  kind  of  good-hearted,  pained  vagueness. 

The  religion  of  the  people  who  never  worry  at  all,  the 
thoughtless  optimists,  is  quite  the  same  too,  except  that  they 
have  a  kind  of  happy,  rosy-lighted  vagueness  instead. 

For  about  two  thousand  years  now,  goodness  has  been  in 
the  hands  of  vague  people.  Some  of  them  have  used  their 
vagueness  to  cry  with  softly,  and  some  of  them  have  used  it  to 
praise  God  with  and  to  have  many  fine,  brave,  general  feehngs 
about  God. 

I  have  tried  faithfully,  speaking  for  one,  to  be  religious  with 
both  of  these  sets  of  people. 

They  make  one  feel  rather  lonesome. 

If  one  goes  about  and  takes  a  grim  happiness,  a  kind  of  iron 
joy  in  seeing  how  successful  a  locomotive  is,  or  if  one  watches 
a  great,  worshipful  ocean  liner  with  dehght,  or  if,  down  in 
New  York,  one  looks  up  and  sees  a  new  skyscraper  going 
slowly  up,  unfolding  into  the  sky  before  one,  lifting  up  its 
gigantic,  restless,  resistless  face  to  God;  there  comes  to  seem  to 
be  something  about  churches  and  about  good  people  and  about 
the  way  they  have  of  acting  and  thinking  about  goodness  and 
doing  things  with  goodness,  that  makes  one  unhappy. 

Perhaps  one  has  just  come  from  it  and  one's  soul  is  filled  with 
the  stern,  glad  singing  of  a  great  foundry,  of  the  religious, 

186 


THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW.  SAYS  HOW      187 

V'ictorious  praising  spirit  of  man,  dipping  up  steel  in  mighty 
spoonfuls  —  the  stuff  the  inside  of  the  earth  is  made  of,  and 
flinging  it  together  into  a  great  network  or  crust  for  the  planet 
—  into  mighty  floors  or  sidewalks  all  round  the  earth  for 
cities  to  tread  on  and  there  comes  to  seem  something  so 
successful,  so  manlike,  so  godlike  about  it,  about  the  way 
these  men  who  do  these  things  do  them  and  do  what  they  set 
out  to  do,  that  when  I  find  myseK  suddenly,  all  in  a  few  minutes 
on  a  Sunday  morning,  thrown  out  of  this  atmosphere  into  a 
Christian  church,  find  myself  sitting  all  still  and  waiting,  with 
all  these  good  people  about  me,  and  when  I  find  them  offering 
me  their  religion  so  gravely,  so  hopefully,  it  all  comes  to  me 
with  a  great  rush  sometimes  —  comes  to  me  as  out  of  great  deeps 
of  resentment,  that  religion  could  possibly  be  made  in  a  church 
to  seem  something  so  faint,  so  beautifully  weary,  so  dreamy, 
and  as  if  it  were  humming  softly,  absently  to  itself. 

I  wonder  in  the  presence  of  a  Christianity  hke  this  whether 
I  am  a  Christian  or  not  —  the  quartet  choirs,  confections, 
the  Httle,  dainty,  faintly  sweet  sermons  —  it  is  as  if  —  no  I  will 
not  say  it.- 

I  have  this  moment  crossed  the  words  out  before  my  eyes. 
It  is  as  if,  after  all,  religion,  instead  of  being  as  I  supposed 
down  at  the  foundry,  the  stern  and  splendid  music  of  man 
conquering  all  things  for  God,  were,  after  all,  some  huge,  sub- 
blime  and  holy  vagueness,  as  if  the  service  and  the  things 
1  saw  about  me  were  not  hard  true  realities  —  as  if  going  to 
Church  were  like  sitting  in  a  cloud  —  some  soft  musical  cloud 
or  floating  island  of  goodness  and  drifting  and  drifting.     . 


Not  all  churches  are  alike,  but  I  am  speaking  of  something 
that  must  have  happened  to  many  men.  I  but  record  this 
blank  space  on  this  page,  as  a  spiritual  fact,  as  a  part  of  the 
religious  experience  of  a  man  trying  to  be  good. 

When  this  little  experience  of  which  the  words  have  to  be 


188  CROWDS 

crossed  out  —  after  going  to  Church  —  finally  settles  down, 
there  is  still  a  grim  truth  left  in  it. 

The  vagueness  of  the  man  who  is  good,  who  locks  himself  up 
in  a  Church  and  says,  "Oh  God!  Oh  God!  Oh  God!"  and  the 
vigour  and  incisiveness  of  the  man  who  says  nothing  about  it 
and  who  goes  out  of  doors  and  acts  like  a  god  all  the  week  — 
these  remain  with  me  as  a  daily  and  abiding  sense. 

And  when  I  find  myself  myself,  I,  who  have  gloried  in  cathe- 
drals since  I  was  a  little  child,  looking  ahead  for  a  God  upon 
the  earth,  and  when  I  see  the  foundries,  the  airships,  the  ocean 
liners  beckoning  the  soul  of  man  upon  the  skies,  and  the  victory 
of  the  soul  over  the  dust  and  over  the  water  and  over  the  air  and 
when  I  see  the  Cathedrals  beside  them,  those  vast,  faint,  grave, 
happy,  floating  islands  of  the  Saved,  drifting  backward  down 
the  years,  it  does  not  seem  as  if  I  could  bear  the  foundries  saying 
one  thing  about  my  God  and  the  cathedrals  saying  another. 

I  have  tried  to  see  a  way  out.     Why  should  it  be  so.? 

I  have  seen  that  the  foundries,  the  ocean  liners,  and  the  air- 
ships are  in  the  hands  of  men  who  say  How. 

Perhaps  we  will  take  goodness  and  cathedrals,  very  soon 
now,  and  put  them  for  a  while  in  the  hands  of  the  men  who  say 
how.  If  St.  Francis,  for  instance,  to-day,  were  to  be  suddenly 
more  like  Bessemer,  or  if  Dr.  Henry  Van  Dyke  were  more  like 
Edison  or  if  the  Reverend  R.  J.  Campbell  were  more  like  Sir 
Joseph  Lister  or  if  the  Bishop  of  London  were  to  go  at  London 
the  way  Marconi  goes  at  the  sky,  what  would  begin  to 
happen  to  goodness?  One  likes  to  imagine  what  would  happen 
if  that  same  spirit,  the  spirit  of  "how"  were  brought  to  bear 
upon  a  great  engineering  enterprise  like  goodness  in  this  world. 

Perhaps  the  spirit  of  "how"  is  the  spirit  of  God. 

Perhaps  religion  in  the  twentieth  century  is  Technique. 

Technique  in  the  twentieth  century  is  the  Holy  Ghost. 

Technique  is  the  very  last  thing  that  has  been  thought  of  in 
religion.  Religion  is  being  converted  before  our  eyes.  It  is 
becoming  touched  with  the  temper  of  science,  with  the  thorough- 


THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW,  SAYS  HOW       189 

ness,  the  doggedness,  the  inconsolableness  of  science  until  it  is 
seeing  how  and  until  it  is  saying  how. 

When  the  inventors,  in  our  machine  age,  get  to  work  on 
goodness  in  the  way  that  they  are  getting  to  work  on  other 
things,  things  will  begin  to  happen  to  goodness  that  the  vague, 
sweet  saints  of  two  thousand  years  have  never  dreamed  of  yet. 

In  London  and  New  York,  in  this  first  quarter  of  the 
twentieth  century  Christianity  will  not  be  put  off  as  a  spirit. 
The  right  of  Christianity  to  be  a  spirit  has  lapsed. 

Christianity  is  a  Method. 

What  Christ  meant  when  He  said  He  was  the  Truth  and  the 
Life,  has  been  understood,  on  the  whole,  very  well.  What 
He  meant  by  saying  He  was  the  Way,  we  are  now  beginning, 
to  work  out. 


A  thousand  or  two  years  ago,  when  two  men  stood  by  the 
roadside  and  made  a  bargain,  it  was  their  affair. 

When  two  men  stand  on  the  sidewalk  now  and  make  a  bargain, 
say  in  New  York,  they  have  to  deal  and  to  deal  very  thought- 
fully and  accurately  with  ninety  million  people  who  are  not 
there.  They  do  this  as  well  as  they  can  by  imagining  what 
the  ninety  million  people  would  do  and  say,  and  how  they 
would  like  to  be  done  by,  if  they  were  there. 

The  facilities  for  finding  out  what  the  ninety  million  people 
would  do  and  say,  and  what  they  would  want,  the  general 
conveniences  for  assuring  the  two  men  on  the  sidewalk  that 
they  will  be  able  to  conduct  their  bargain,  and  to  get  the  other 
ninety  million  in,  accurately,  that  they  will  be  able  to  do  by 
them  as  they  would '  be  done  by  —  these  have  scarcely  been 
arranged  for  yet. 

In  our  machine  age,  with  our  railroads,  and  our  tele- 
phones suddenly  heaping  our  lives  up  on  one  another's 
lives,  almost  before  we  have  noticed  it,  our  religious 
machinery  to  go  with  our  other  machinery,   our  machinery 


190  CROWDS 

that  we  are  going  to  be  Christians  with,  has  not  been  in- 
\ented  yet. 

When  one  thinks  of  it,  very  few  arrangements  have  yet  been 
made  for  seeing  or  knowing  or  meeting  Christ  in  New  York. 
The  ways  that  have  been  worked  out  so  far  for  getting  boys  and 
girls  —  a  miUion  boys  and  girls  in  New  York  — to  know  or  to  think 
of  Christ  or  to  guess  what  Christ  is  like,  cannot  be  taken 
seriously. 

Christmas  probably  is  the  best  one. 

But  it  is  very  sad  —  spending  a  Christmas  in  New 
York. 

Who  would  ever  get  an  idea  of  what  Christ  was  like  from 
a  New  York  Christmas,  or  an  idea  that  He  was  majestic  enough 
or  sublime  enough  or  powerful  enough  to  go  with  a  mighty  city 
like  New  York,  or  practical  enough  to  determine  what  New  York 
should  be  like  and  really  be  a  Saviour  —  that  is :  really  be  what 
He  says  He  is? 

The  country  belfries  have  their  Christmas,  a  very  pretty  well- 
enough  Christmas,  holly  wreathes,  and  carols,  and  sleigh-rides, 
and  stockings,  and  Santa  Claus. 

But  we  want  a  Christmas  that  goes  with  New  York! 

Why  should  Christmas  —  that  stern,  imperious  moment  in 
the  world,  when  God  turned  the  earth  over  and  began  all  in  a 
minute,  with  a  child's  cry  and  a  woman's  smile,  a  new  human 
race  —  why  should  Christmas  be  tucked  away  in  men's  minds  as 
a  feebly  pretty  country  sentiment,  a  woman's  holyday,  a  baby's 
frolic  —  the  sublimest  event  on  earth  thrust  playfully  into  the 
bottom  of  a  stocking? 

The  challenge  goes  out  from  a  world  of  men  to  the  churches. 
We  want  a  men's  Christmas,  a  Christmas  that  goes  with  the 
Singer  Tower,  with  the  ring  of  the  subways  under  New  York, 
with  the  mighty  railway  stations,  with  the  Imperator,  with  Hell 
Gate  Bridge  —  all  those  stern  and  splendid  prayers  in  steel  and 
stone  of  men. 

We  appeal  to  the  churches  for  a  big,  arresting,  believing  Christ- 


THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW,  SAYS  HOW        191 

mas ;  we  seek  a  Christ  who  grapples  with  the  things  and  the  men 
we  see  about  us  every  day,  with  the  shrewd  hopes,  the  sublime 
risks,  the  visions  and  desires  of  the  deep-hearted  city. 

Every  Christmas  morning,  now,  behind  Santa  Claus's  jolly 
smile  in  New  York  I  see  Christ's  sad  one ! 

Christmas  morning  I  hear  the  bells  climbing  up  and  saying 
over  and  over  New  York,  "Christ  was  born  nineteen  hundred 
and  thirteen  years  ago  to-day!" 

In  my  heart  I  —  as  I  look  about  me  —  I  count  the  years  out 
and  say  them  over,  "Nineteen  hundred  and  thirteen  years  ago 
to-day!" 

We  are  waiting  for  one  single  church  bell,  be  it  ever  so 
simple  or  even  tinkly,  down  under  these  awful  cliffs  of  stone 
and  glass  that  we  shall  hear  singing  gaily  up  through  the  roar, 
up  through  the  bottomless,  absent-minded  city  —  singing  to 
the  stones  and  to  the  glass,  "Christ  is  born  TO-DAYJ" 

Of  course  the  carols  all  begin  so.  The  word  to-day  is  in  them, 
but  shepherds  that  were  alive  two  thousand  years  ago  and  angels 
that  were  never  exactly  alive  at  all  are  supposed  to  be  singing 
them  to  us. 

Everything  seems  so  far  away.  Everything  is  in  the  country. 
How  many  are  there  out  of  all  the  choir  boys,  and  all  the  min- 
isters, and  the  good  women,  who  while  they  are  singing  about 
Christ's  Christmas,  are  really  seeing  theirs  —  a  Christmas  for 
the  Woolworth  Building;  how  many  are  there  who  are  really 
feeling  while  they  sing,  that  Christ  is  born  to-day  for  the  Hotel 
Astor  —  that  a  saviour  is  here  now,  at  last,  who  can  do  some- 
thing with  Times  Square,  the  Italian  Quarter,  Riverside  Drive, 
the  Tombs,  and  Wall  Street? 

I  wish  that  the  bells  would  keep  still  a  minute,  and  think  I 
We  are  weary  of  a  noisy,  gaily  heartless  Christmas,  dolls  in 
our  stockings,  candy  in  our  mouths,  bells  in  our  ears  —  all  to 
keep  us  from  thinking,  all  to  keep  us  from  looking  at  facts,  and 
from  facing  New  York  the  way  Christ  would ! 

One  cannot  help  wondering  what  Christ  would  think  of  it. 


192  CROWDS 

going  about  hearing  all  these  good  people  singing  about  his 
beautiful  dead  birthday.  All  these  crowded  city  children  sing- 
ing about  how  he  was  born  in  the  country.  He  would  silence 
the  bells  and  stop  the  music,  I  believe.  I  believe  He  would  ask 
people  to  look  at  New  York  now,  to  look  up  with  Him  at  the 
Woolworth  Building,  look  up  with  Him  at  the  flaming  whirl  of 
Broadway  —  with  Him  at  the  mountain  of  taxis  up  Fifth 
Avenue,  at  the  flood  of  the  faces  of  men  and  women  and  children 
in  the  Bowery,  and  He  would  tell  the  children  and  the  people 
that  He  was  not  a  mere  country  saviour,  that  He  gloried  in  New 
York,  that  He  loved  and  believed  in  New  York,  and  that  he  was 
Man  enough  and  God  enough  to  hold  and  conquer  and  save 
New  York.  And  then  while  he  spoke,  the  carols  would  be 
silent  and  the  people  would  be  silent. 

And  then  when  they  believed  Him,  that  would  be  their 
Christmas. 

It  would  be  a  men's  Christmas. 

Religion  consists  to-day  in  getting  Christ  out  of  the  hands  of 
women  and  children  into  the  hands  of  grown  men  and  fighters  — 
in  moving  Christ  in  from  the  country,  and  in  the  meantime,  if 
we  may  be  borne  with,  hanging  as  it  were  —  for  the  great  grim 
city  —  a  stocking  on  the  corner  of  the  Metropolitan  Tower  does 
not  strike  us  as  Christmas  for  New  York.  Neither  does  a  mere 
mantelpiece  Christmas  or  giving  dolls  to  children  who  ought  to 
have  play-grounds,  caramels  when  they  need  air,  cards  with 
Jesus  on  them,  mottoes  when  they  need  milk  and  beef,  schools 
and  religion  —  religion  —  something  happy  and  real  and  serious 
to  believe  all  day  and  all  night  about  New  York  while  they 
live  in  it. 

We  seek  a  Christ  who  goes  with  the  lift  and  wonder  of  our 
cities,  with  their  reach  and  glory  —  with  the  people's  expecta- 
tions. A  Christmas  that  is  afraid  of  us,  and  suspicious  of  de- 
mocracy or  crowds,  that  is  tremulous  about  New  York,  that 
does  not  dare  tackle  a  big,  serious,  actual,  social,  human  fact, 
like  a  skyscraper,  with  its  religion,  a  Christmas  that  in  its  secret 


THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW,  SAYS  HOW       193 

heart  longs  for  dells  to  be  good  in,  prefers  village-greens  for 
God  and  all  those  dear  old  little,  gentle,  cross-road  altars 
.     .     .     we  will  not  be  put  off  with. 


There  may  be  touches  in  the  New  Testament  which,  taken 
by  themselves,  might  seem  to  shut  Christ  away  for  all  practical 
purposes  as  a  country  Saviour.  If  one  thinks  of  local  color,  or 
of  the  little  concrete  things  about  Him,  of  His  language  and 
metaphors,  He  is  a  Saviour  who  goes  with  mangers,  corn,  lilies, 
sheep,  cattle,  orchards,  and  mountains,  and  even  when  He  speaks 
of  cities,  or  of  crowds,  or  when  He  weeps  over  Jerusalem,  He 
speaks  of  a  hen  with  her  chickens.  And  so,  for  hundreds  of  years 
at  a  time,  people  have  tried  to  save  the  world  with  a  Saviour's 
geography  rather  than  with  His  authority  and  His  spirit.  They 
have  fallen  into  taking  the  New  Testament  as  a  back-to- 
the-soil  argument,  faint  and  full  of  suspicion  and  weariness 
toward  cities  and  toward  crowds. 

But  there  is  nothing  in  the  attitude  of  Christ  Himself  toward 
a  crowd  that  favors  this  idea. 

Jesus  was  crowded  the  very  first  minute  of  His  life  and  He 
was  never  away  from  crowds  at  all,  apparently,  except  a  few 
minutes  at  a  time,  until  He  died.  He  was  born  in  a  crowd,  He 
died  in  one,  nearly  everything  He  did  was  done  with  a  crowd 
looking  on.  He  seems  to  have  been  allowed  very  few  quiet 
words  alone  with  people,  and  even  on  mountains,  which  are  the 
natural  place  to  go  to  get  away  from  crowds,vast,  slow,  wander- 
ing cities  of  people  followed  Him. 


I  have  been  looking  at  these  Van  der  Weyde  pictures  of  New 
York  at  night.  They  give  one  the  sudden  sense  of  seeing  New 
York  as  it  really  is.'  New  York  stirs  one  while  one  looks,  like 
some  mighty  host,  like  a  battle  —  that  vast  all-enfolding,  bot- 
tomless, roofless  darkness  reaching  out  and  rolling  in  —  the 


194  CROWDS 

fierce,  eager,  mighty  little  city  beating  it  off  .  .  .  long 
flails  of  light  called  streets,  millions  of  little  port  holes  all  firing 
away  at  the  blackness,  beating  it  off !     . 

And  down  beneath  all  those  golden,  glowing  floods  of 
people ! 

And  when  I  look  upon  New  York  in  this  way,  look  upon  that 
stupendous  fighting  spirit  in  it,  fighting  against  the  air,  against 
*he  sea,  that  huge  conquering  will  toward  Nature,  toward  hu- 
man nature,  iron,  copper,  radium,  icebergs,  trusts 
New  York  struggling  like  some  dim,  splendid  god,  with  chem- 
istry, geology,  astronomy,  hitching  up  the  clouds,  melting 
down  the  earth,  and  butting  up  into  the  sky,  I  feel  suddenly 
very  lonely  about  what  is  supposed  to  do  for  a  Christmas  for 
New  York. 

And  when  I  go  into  a  chapel  and  look  about  me  at  what  is 
supposed  to  be  a  Saviour  for  New  York,  and  hear  the  good 
people  about  me  singing  a  hymn,  "  Knocking,  knocking,  who  is 
there?"  and  when  I  find  that  they  are  presenting  this  kind  of  a 
Saviour,  gravely,  sadly,  wearily  as  a  Saviour  for  New  York,  an 
innocent,  helpless,  bewildered  Saviour  for  the  great  city,  I  am 
filled  with  sorrow,  and  then,  with  a  sudden  glad  anger.  I 
find  myself  saying,  "I  will  not  have  a  country  Saviour.  I 
will  not  worship  or  try  to  get  others  to  worship  a  Saviour 
who  says  'Please,'  to  New  York,  an  ineffectual,  plaintive 
person,  a  lovely  outsider,  clinging  and  teasing  for  souls,  pull- 
ing and  nagging  faintly  at  the  mighty  city  and  feeling  it  cannot 
be  good!" 

Perhaps  the  reason  that  boys  are  getting  out  of  the  Sunday- 
schools  and  churches  as  quick  as  they  can  is  that  a  clinging  or 
lady-like  religion  does  not  interest  them.  Perhaps  the  reason 
that  Christmas,  except  as  a  kind  of  annual  little  heaven  for  de- 
partment stores,  does  not  interest  grown  men  in  New  York,  is 
that  these  same  men  daily,  hourly,  are  believing  and  acting  as  if 
they  believed  big,  faithful  and  daring  things  for  New  York,  and 
they  do  not  want  to  stop  or  be  interrupted  by  a  Christmas  that 


THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW,  SAYS  HOW        195 

feels  afraid  of  business  and  of  business  men  and  of  iron- 
hearted  cities. 

The  people  in  New  York  to-day  who  are  really  having  a 
Christmas,  who  are  really  worshipping  and  confessing  Christ  in 
it,  are  the  people  in  it,  inside  the  churches  or  out,  who  are  be- 
lieving the  biggest  things  for  New  York,  who  have  staked  New 
York  off  for  Christ,  who  have  assailed  the  city  with  the  Golden 
Rule,  with  big  motives,  with  high  service,  and  who  are  taking 
it  for  granted  every  day  and  hour  in  private  business,  in  public 
affairs,  that  men  and  religion  and  Christ  and  New  York  belong 
together. 

These  men  may  be  exceptional  men,  but  they  have  the  only 
Christmas  that  is  big  enough  or  that  has  gusto  enough  to  claim 
for  its  own  a  great  ringing,  manly  book  like  the  New  Testament. 

A  n:  ill  ion  New  York  men  to-day  are  seeking  Christ.  One 
can  see  them  any  day,  going  up  and  down  the  streets  whatever 
they  are  doing,  every  minute,  in  their  hearts  fighting  for  a  re- 
ligion that  cuts  clean  down  through,  and  that  they  can  believe 
clean  down  through  into  their  lives.  We  want  a  religion  that 
we  can  breathe,  eat,  earn,  and  spend  with,  do  business  with. 
Boy  choirs  do  not  seem  to  us  to  express  this  religion.  It  is  a 
religion  with  a  sterner,  gladder  music  in  it  than  theirs.  It  gives, 
or  is  going  to  give,  when  one  is  near  it,  the  sense  of  exulting  and 
mighty  things  being  made  (like  some  great  boiler  works  singing 
out  through  its  windows  as  one  goes  past)  —  the  sense  of  some 
great  burning  heat  —  the  sense  of  a  world  building  in  our  ears . 
We  seek  a  religion  we  can  melt  down,  roll  out,  rivet  into  labor, 
into  capital,  into  trade;  a  religion  a  great  city  can  take,  and  as 
in  some  vast  thronging  ringing  place,  lift  mightily  up  —  crowd 
hammer  and  rivet  into  life. 

From  the  day  I  first  thought  of  this  my  whole  world  has 
been  different.  I  have  gone  up  and  down  New  York  and 
heard  its  streets  singing  its  new  religion.  I  have  seen  men 
who  are  fearless  and  expectant  before  crowds,  who  are  uncowed 
by  steel  and  glass,  and  humble  only  before  God. 


196  CROWDS 

They  are  moving  Christ  in  from  the  country. 

ReHgion  two-men  size,  or  man  and  woman  size,  or  one  family 
or  two  family  size  or  village  size  has  been  worked  out.  Religion 
as  long  as  it  has  been  concerned  with  a  few  people  and  was  a 
matter  of  love  between  neighbours,  or  of  skill  in  being  neigh- 
bourly, has  had  no  special  or  imperative  need  for  science  or 
the  scientific  man. 

Now  that  religion  is  obliged  to  be  an  intimate,  a  confiding 
relation  between  ninety  million  people,  the  spiritual  genius, 
devotion,  and  holiness  of  the  scientific  man,  of  the  man  who 
says  "how"  has  come  to  be  the  modern  man's  almost  only 
access  to  his  God. 

A  ninety  million  man-power  religion  is  an  enterprise  of 
spiritual  engineering,  a  feat  in  national  and  international  states- 
manship, a  gigantic  structural  constructive  achievement  in 
human  nature.  Doing  as  one  would  be  done  by,  with  a  few 
people,  is  a  thing  that  any  man  can  sit  down  and  read  his  Bible 
a  few  minutes  and  arrange  for  himself.  He  can  manage  to  do 
as  he  would  be  done  by,  fairly  well  in  the  next  yard.  But 
how  about  doing  as  one  would  be  done  by  with  ninety  miUion 
people  —  all  sizes,  all  climates,  all  religions,  Buffalo,  New 
Orleans,  Seattle?  How  about  doing  as  one  would  be  done  by 
three  thousand  miles.'* 

It  is  an  understatement  to  say,  as  we  look  about  our  modern 
world,  that  Christianity  has  not  been  tried  yet.' 

Christianity  has  not  been  invented  yet. 

What  was  invented  two  thousand  years  ago  was  the  spirit 
of  Christianity. 

Christianity  has  been  for  two  thousand  years  a  spirit. 

It  is  almost  like  a  new  religion  to  me  just  of  itself  to  think 
of  it.  It  is  like  being  presented  suddenly  with  a  new  world  to 
think  of  it,  to  think  that  all  we  have  really  done  with  Christian- 
ity as  yet  is  to  use  it  as  a  breath  or  spirit. 

I  look  at  the  vision  of  the  earth  to-day,  of  the  great  cities 


THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW.  SAYS  HOW      197 

rushing  together  at  last  and  running  around  the  world  like 
children  running  around  a  house  —  great  cities  shouting  on  the 
seas,  suddenly  shding  up  and  down  the  globe,  playing  hop- 
scotch on  the  equator,  scrambling  up  the  poles  —  all  these 
colossal  children!  .  .  .  Here  we  all  are !  —  a  whiff  of  steam 
from  the  Watts's  steam  kettle  and  a  wave  of  Marconi  across  the 
air  and  we  have  crept  up  from  our  httle  separate  sunsets,  all  our 
Uttle  private  national  bedrooms  of  light  and  darkness  into  the 
one  single  same  cunning  dooryard  of  a  world!  Our  religion, 
our  politics,  our  Bibles,  kings,  millionaires,  crowds,  bombs, 
prophets  and  railroads  all  hurling,  sweeping,  crashing  our  lives 
together  in  a  kind  of  vast  international  colhsion  of  intimacy. 

All  the  Christianity  we  can  bring  to  bear  or  that  we  can  use 
to  run  this  crash  of  intimacy  with  is  a  spirit,  a  breath. 

We  do  not  well  to  berate  one  another  or  to  berate  one 
another's  motives  or  to  assail  human  nature  or  to  grow  satirical 
about  God  with  all  our  little  battered  helpless  Christians 
about  us  and  our  unadjusted  religions. 

We  are  a  new  human  race  grappling  with  a  new  world. 
Our  Christianity  has  not  been  invented  yet  and  if  we  want  a 
God,  we  will  work  like  chemists,  like  airmen,  turn  the  inside 
of  the  earth  out,  dump  the  sky,  move  mountains,  face  cities, 
love  one  another,  and  find  Him ! 

In  the  meantime  until  we  have  done  this,  until  we  have 
worked  as  chemists  and  airmen  work,  Christianity  is  a  spirit. 

It  explains  all  this  eager  jumble  of  the  world,  brushes  away 
our  objections,  frees  our  hearts,  gives  us  our  program,  makes 
us  know  what  we  are  for,  to  stop  and  think  a  moment  of  this  — 
that  Christianity  is  a  spirit. 

Everything  that  is  passing  wonderful  is  a  spirit  at  first.  God 
begins  building  a  world  as  a  world-spirit,  out  of  a  spirit  brooding 
upon  the  waters.  Then  for  a  long  while  the  vague  waters,  then 
for  a  long  while  a  little  vague  land  or  spirit-of-planet  before  a 
real  world. 

And  every  real  belief  that  man  has  had,  has  begim  as  a  spirit. 


198  CROWDS 

For  two  thousand  years  Man  has  had  the  spirit  of  immortahty. 
Homer  had  it.  Homer  had  moments  when  improvising  his 
mighty  song  all  alone,  of  hearing  or  seeming  to  hear,  faintly, 
choruses  of  men's  voices  singing  his  songs  after  him,  a  thousand 
years  away. 

As  he  groped  his  way  up  in  his  singing,  he  felt  them  in  spirit, 
perhaps,  the  lonely  wandering  minstrels  in  little  closed-in 
valleys,  or  on  the  vast  quiet  hills,  filling  the  world  with  his  voice 
when  he  was  dead,  going  about  with  his  singing,  breaking  it  in 
upon  the  souls  of  children,  of  the  new  boys  and  girls,  and  build- 
ing new  worlds  and  rebuilding  old  worlds  in  the  hearts  of  nien. 
Homer  had  the  spirit  of  hearing  his  own  voice  forever,  but  the 
technique  of  it,  the  important  point  of  seeing  how  the  thing 
could  really  be  done,  of  seeing  how  people,  instead  of  listening 
to  imitations  or  copies  or  awkward  echoes  of  Homer,  should 
listen  to  Homer's  voice  itself  —  the  timbre,  the  intimacy,  the 
subtlety,  the  strength  of  it  —  the  depth  of  his  heart  singing  out 
of  it.  All  this  has  had  to  wait  to  be  thought  out  by  Thomas  A. 
Edison. 

Man  has  not  only  for  thousands  of  years  had  the  spirit  of 
immortality,  of  keeping  his  voice  filed  away  if  any  one  wanted  it 
on  the  earth,  forever,  but  he  has  had  all  the  other  spirits  or 
ghosts  of  his  mightier  self.  He  has  had  the  spirit  of  being 
imperious  and  wilful  with  the  sea,  of  faring  forth  on  a  planet 
and  playing  with  oceans,  and  now  he  has  worked  out  the  details 
in  ocean  liners,  in  boats  that  fly  up  from  the  water,  and  in  boats 
which  dive  and  swim  beneath  the  sea.  For  thousands  of  years 
he  has  had  the  spirit  of  the  locomotive  working  through,  troops 
of  runners  or  of  dim  men  groping  defiantly  with  camels  through 
deserts,  or  sweeping  on  on  horses  through  the  plains,  and  now 
with  his  banners  of  steam  at  last  he  has  great  public  trains  of 
cars  carrying  cities. 

For  hundreds  of  years  man  has  had  the  spirit  of  the  motor- 
car —  of  having  his  own  private  locomotive  or  his  own  special 
train  drive  up  to  his  door — the  spirit  of  naaking  every  road  his 


THE  MAN  WHO  SAYS  HOW.  SAYS  HOW      199 

railway.  For  a  great  many  years  he  has  had  the  spirit  of  the 
wireless  telegraph  and  of  using  the  sky.  Franklin  tried  using 
the  sky  years  ago  but  all  he  got  was  electricity.  Marconi  knew 
how  better.  Marconi  has  got  ghosts  of  men's  voices  out  of  the 
clouds,  has  made  heaven  a  somiding  board  for  great  congrega- 
tions of  cities,  and  faraway  nations  wrapped  in  darkness  and 
silence  whisper  round  the  roUing  earth.  Man  has  long  had  the 
spirit  of  defying  the  seas.  Now  he  has  the  technique  and  the 
motor-boat.  He  has  had  the  spirit  of  removing  oceans  and  of 
building  huge,  underground  cities,  the  spirit  of  caves  in  the 
ground  and  mansions  in  the  sky,  and  now  he  has  subways  and 
skyscrapers.  For  a  thousand  years  he  has  had  the  spirit  of 
Christ  and  now  there  is  Frederick  Taylor,  Louis  Brandeis, 
Westfield  Pure  Food,  Doctor  Carrel,  Jane  Addams,  and  Filene's 
Store.  Vast  networks — huge  spiritual  machines  of  goodness 
are  crowding  and  penetrating  to-day,  fifteen  pounds  to  the 
square  inch,  the  atmosphere  of  the  gospel  into  the  very  core 
of  the  matter  of  the  world,  into  the  everyday  things,  into  the 
solids  of  the  Uves  of  men. 

It  takes  two  great  spirits  of  humanity  to  bring  a  great  truth 
or  a  new  goodness  into  this  world;  one  spirit  creates  it,  the  other 
conceives  it,  gathers  the  earth  about  it  and  gives  it  birth. 
These  two  spirits  seem  to  be  the  spirits  of  the  poet  and  the 
scientist. 

We  are  taking  to-day,  many  of  us,  an  almost  religious 
delight  in  them  both.     We  make  no  comparisons. 

We  note  that  the  poet's  inspiration  comes  first  and  consists 
in  saying  something  that  is  true,  that  cannot  be  proved. 

A  few  people  with  imagination,  here  and  there,  believe  it. 

The  scientist's  inspiration  comes  second  and  consists  in  seeing 
ways  of  proving  it,  of  making  it  matter  of  fact. 

He  proves  it  by  seeing  how  to  do  it. 

Crowds  beheve  it. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
AND  THE  JVIACHINE  STARTS 

ONE  of  the  things  that  makes  one  thoughtful  in  going  about 
from  city  to  city  and  dropping  into  the  churches  is  the  way  the 
people  do  not  sing  in  them  and  will  not  pray  in  them.  In 
every  new  strange  city  where  one  stops  on  a  Sunday  morning, 
one  looks  hopefully  —  while  one  hears  the  chimes  of  bells  —  at 
the  row  of  steeples  down  the  street.  One  looks  for  people 
going  in  who  seem  to  go  with  chimes  of  bells.  And  when  one 
goes  in,  one  finds  them  again  and  again,  inside,  all  these 
bolt-up-right,  faintly  sing-song  congregations. 

One  wonders  about  the  churches. 

What  is  there  that  is  being  said  in  them  that  should  make 
any  one  feel  like  singing? 

The  one  thing  that  the  churches  are  for  is  news  —  news  that 
would  be  suitable  to  sing  about,  and  that  would  naturally  make 
one  want  to  sing  and  pray  after  one  had  heard  it. 

There  is  very  little  occasion  to  sing  or  to  pray  over  old  news. 

Worship  would  take  care  of  itself  in  our  churches  if  people 
got  the  latest  and  biggest  news  in  them. 

News  is  the  latest  faith  men  have  in  one  another,  the  last 
thing  they  have  dared  to  get  from  God. 

It  is  not  impossible  that  just  at  the  present  moment,  and  for 
some  little  time  to  come,  there  is  really  very  little  worth  while 
that  can  be  said  about  Christianity,  until  Christianity  has  been 
tried.  I  cannot  conceive  of  Christ's  coming  back  and  saying 
anything  just  at  the  moment.  He  would  merely  wonder  why, 
in  all  these  two  thousand  years,  we  had  not  arranged  to  do  any- 
thing about  what  He  had  said  before.     He  would  wonder  how 

20'0 


AND  THE  MACHINE  STARTS  201 

we  could  keep  oh  so,  making  his  great  faith  for  us  so 'poetic, 
visionary,  and  ineflScient. 

It  is  in  the  unconscious  recognition  of  this  and  of  the  present 
spiritual  crisis  of  the  world,  that  our  best  men,  so  many  of  them, 
instead  of  going  into  preaching  are  going  into  laboratories  and 
into  business  where  what  the  gospel  really  is  and  what  it  is 
really  made  of,  is  being  at  last  revealed  to  people  —  where 
news  is  being  created. 

Perhaps  it  would  not  be  precisely  true  —  what  I  have  said, 
about  Christ's  not  saying  anything.  He  probably  would. 
But  he  would  not  say  these  same  merely  rudimentary  things. 
He  would  go  on  to  the  truths  and  applications  we  have  never 
heard  or  guessed.  The  rest  of  his  time  he  would  put  in  in 
proving  that  the  things  that  had  been  merely  said  two  thousand 
years  ago,  could  be  done  now.  And  He  would  do  what  He 
could  toward  having  them  dropped  forever,  taken  for  granted 
and  acted  on  as  a  part  of  the  morally  automatic  and  of -course 
machinery  of  the  world. 

The  Golden  Rule  takes  or  ought  to  take,  very  soon  now,  in 
real  religion,  somewhat  the  same  position  that  table  manners 
take  in  morals. 

All  good  manners  are  good  in  proportion  as  they  become 
automatic.  In  saying  that  honesty  pays  we  are  merely  mov- 
ing religion  on  to  its  more  creative  and  newer  levels.  We 
are  asserting  that  the  literal  belief  in  honesty,  after  this, 
ought  to  be  attended  to  practically  by  machinery.  People 
ought  to  be  honest  automatically  and  by  assumption,  by 
dismissing  it  in  business  in  particular,  as  a  thing  to  be  taken 
for  granted. 

This  is  what  is  going  to  happen. 

Without  the  printing  press  a  book  would  cost  about  ten 
thousand  dollars,  each  copy. 

With  the  printing  press,  the  first  copy  of  a  book  costs  perhaps 
about  six  hundred  dollars. 

The  second  costs  —  twenty-nine  cents. 


202  CROWDS 

The-  same  principle  holds  good  under  the  law  of  moral  auto- 
matics. 

Let  the  plates  be  cast.  Everything  follows.  The  fire  in  the 
Iroquois  Theatre  in  Chicago  cost  six  hundred  dead  bodies. 

Within  a  few  months  outward  opening  doors  flew  open  to  the 
streets  around  a  world. 

Everybody  knew  about  outward  opening  doors  before. 

They  had  the  spirit  of  outward  opening  doors.  But  the 
machinery  for  making  everybody  know  that  they  knew  it  — 
the  moral  and  spiritual  machinery  for  lifting  over  the  doors  of 
a  world  and  making  them  all  swing  suddenly  generation  after 
generation  the  other  way,  had  not  been  set  up. 

Of  course  it  would  have  been  better  if  there  had  been  three 
hundred  dead  bodies  or  three  dead  bodies  —  but  the  principle 
holds  good  —  let  the  moral  plates  be  cast  and  the  huge  moral 
values  follow  with  comparatively  little  individual  moral  hand 
labour.  The  moral  hand  labour  moves  on  to  more  original 
things. 

The  same  principle  holds  good  in  letting  an  American  city 
be  good  —  in  seeing  how  to  make  goodness  in  a  city  work. 

Let  the  plates  be  once  cast  —  say  Galveston,  Texas;  or 
De  Moines,  Iowa,  and  goodness  after  you  have  your  first  speci- 
men gets  national  automatically. 

Two  hundred  and  five  cities  have  adopted  the  Galveston  or 
commission  government  in  three  years. 


The  failure  for  the  time  being  apparently  of  the  more  noble 
and  aggressive  kinds  of  goodness  against  the  forces  of  evil  is  a 
matter  of  technique.  Our  failure  is  not  due  to  our  failure  to 
know  what  evil  really  is,  but  due  to  our  wasteful  way  of  tun- 
nelling through  it. 

Our  religious  inventors  have  failed  to  use  the  most  scientific 
method.  We  have  gone  at  the  matter  of  butting  through  evil 
without  thinking  enough.     Less  butting  and  more  thinking 


AND  THE  MACHINE  STARTS  203 

is  our  religion  now.  We  will  not  try  any  longer  to  butt  a  whole 
planet  when  we  try  to  keep  one  man  from  doing  wrong. 

We  wiU  butt  our  way  through  to  the  man  who  sees  where  to 
butt  and  how  to  butt.     Then  all  together! 

Very  few  of  the  wrongs  that  are  done  to  society  by  individuals 
would  be  done  if  civiUzation  were  supplied  with  the  slightest 
adequate  machinery  or  conveniences  for  bringing  home  to 
people  vividly  who  the  people  are  they  are  wronging,  how  they 
are  wronging  them,  and  how  the  people  feel  about  it.  This 
machinery  for  moral  and  social  insight,  this  intelligence- 
engine  or  apparatus  of  sympathy  for  a  planet  to-day,  before 
our  eyes  is  being  invented  and  set  up. 


Sometimes  I  almost  think  that  history  as  a  study  or  partic- 
ularly as  a  habit  of  mind  ought  to  be  partitioned  off  and  not 
allowed  to  people  in  general  to-day.  Only  men  of  genius  have 
imagination  enough  for  handling  history  so  that  it  is  not  a 
nuisance,  a  provinciaUsm  and  an  impertinence  in  the  serene 
presence  to-day  of  what  is  happening  before  our  eyes.  History 
.makes  common  people  stop  thinking  or  makes  them  think 
wrong,  about  nine  tenths  of  the  area  of  human  nature,  partic- 
ularly about  the  next  important  things  that  are  going  to  happen 
to  it. 

Our  modern  life  is  not  an  historian's  problem.  It  is  an 
inventor's  problem.  The  historian  can  stand  by  and  can  be 
consulted.  But  things  that  seem  to  an  historian  quite  reason- 
ably impossible  in  human  nature  are  true  and  we  must  all  of 
us  act  every  day  as  if  they  were  true.  We  but  change  the  tem- 
perature of  human  nature  and  in  one  moment  new  levels  and 
possibilities  open  up  on  every  side. 

Things  that  are  true  about  water  stop  being  true  the  moment 
it  is  heated  212  degrees  Fahrenheit.  It  begins  suddenly  to  act 
hke  a  cloud  and  when  it  is  cooled  off  enough  a  cloud  acts  like 
a  stone.     Railroad  trains  are  run  for  hundreds  of  miles  every 


203a  CROWDS 

year  in  Siberia  across  clouds  that  are  cold  enough.  We  raise 
the  temperature  of  human  nature  and  the  motives  with  which 
men  cannot  act  to-day  suddenly  around  a  world  are  the  motives 
with  which  they  cannot  help  acting  to-morrow. 

The  theory  of  raised  temperatures  alone,  in  human  nature, 
will  make  possible  to  us  ranges  of  goodness,  of  social  pas- 
sion and  vision,  that  only  a  few  men  have  been  capable  of 
before. 

All  the  new  inventions  have  new  sins,  even  new  manners  that 
go  with  them,  new  virtues  and  new  faculties.  The  telephone, 
the  motor-car,  the  wireless  telegraph,  the  airship  and  the  motor- 
boat  all  make  men  act  with  different  insights,  longer  distances, 
and  higher  speeds. 

Men  who,  hke  our  modern  men,  have  a  going  consciousness, 
see  things  deeper  by  going  faster. 

They  see  how  more  clearly  by  going  faster. 

They  see  farther  by  going  faster. 

If  a  man  is  driving  a  motor-car  three  miles  an  hour  all  he 
needs  to  attend  to  with  his  imagination  is  a  few  feet  of  the 
road  ahead. 

If  he  is  driving  his  car  thirty  miles  an  hour  and  trying  to  get 
on  by  anticipating  his  road  a  few  feet  ahead,  he  dies. 

The  faster  a  man  goes — if  he  has  the  brains  for  it — the 
more  people  and  the  more  things  in  the  way,  his  mind  covers 
in  a  minute — the  more  magnificently  he  sees  how. 

On  a  railway  train  any  ordinary  man  any  day  in  the  year 
(if  he  goes  fast  enough)  can  see  through  a  board  fence.  It 
may  be  made  of  vertical  slats  five  inches  across  and  half  an 
inch  apart.  He  sees  through  the  slits  between  the  slats  the 
whole  country  for  miles.  If  he  goes  fast  enough  a  man  can 
see  through  a  sohd  freight  train. 

All  our  modern  industrial  social  problems  are  problems  of 
gearing  people  up.  Ordinary  men  are  living  on  trains  now — 
on  moral  trains. 

Their  social  consciousnes  is  being  geared  up.      They  are  see- 


AND  THE  MACHINE  STARTS  2036 

ing  more  other  people  and  more  other  things  and  more  things 
beyond  the  Fence. 

The  increased  vibration  in  human  nature  and  in  the  human 
brain  and  heart  that  go  with  the  motor-car  habit,  the  increased 
speed  of  the  human  motor,  the  gearing  up  of  the  central  power 
house  in  society  everywhere  is  going  to  make  men  capable  of 
unheard-of  social  technique.  The  social  consciousness  is 
becoming  the  common  man's  daily  habit.  Laws  of  social  tech- 
nique and  laws  of  human  nature  which  were  theories  once  are 
habits  now. 

There  is  a  certain  sense  in  which  it  may  be  said  that  the 
modern  man  enjoys  daily  his  moral  imagination.  He  is  angered 
and  delighted  with  his  social  consciousness.  He  boils  with  rage 
or  sings  when  he  hears  of  all  the  new  machines  of  good  and 
machines  of  evil  that  people  are  setting  up  in  our  modern 
world. 

There  is  a  sense  in  which  he  glories  in  the  Golden  Rule.  The 
moral-machinist's  joy  is  in  him.  He  is  not  content  to  watch  it 
go  round  and  round  like  some  smooth-running  Corliss  engine 
which  is  not  connected  up  yet  —  that  nobody  really  uses  except 
as  a  kind  of  model  under  glass  or  a  miniature  for  theological 
schools.  He  cannot  bear  the  Golden  Rule  under  glass.  He 
wants  to  see  it  going  round  and  round,  look  up  at  it,  immense, 
silent,  masterful,  running  a  world.  He  delights  in  the  Golden 
Rule  as  a  part  of  his  love  of  nature.  It  is  as  the  falling  of  apples 
to  him.  He  delights  in  it  as  he  delights  in  frost  and  fire  and 
in  the  glorious,  modest,  implacable,  hushed  way  they  work ! 

We  are  in  an  age  in  which  a  Golden  Rule  can  sing.  The  men 
around  us  are  in  a  new  temper.  They  have  the  passion, 
almost,  the  religion  of  precision  that  goes  with  machines. 

\\Tiile  I  have  been  sitting  at  my  desk  and  writing  these  last 
words,  the  two  half -past-eight  trains,  at  full  speed,  have  met 
in  the  meadow. 

There  is  something  a  little  impersonal,  almost  abstracted, 
about  the  way  the  trains  meet  out  here  on  their  lonely  sidewalk 


203c  CROWDS 

through  the  meadow,  twenty  inches  apart  —  morning  after 
morning.  It  always  seems  as  if  this  time  —  this  one  next  time 
—  they  would  not  do  it  right.  One  argues  it  all  out  uncon- 
sciously that  of  course  there  is  a  kind  of  understanding  between 
them  as  they  come  bearing  down  on  each  other  and  it's  all  been 
arranged  beforehand  when  they  left  their  stations;  and  yet 
somehow  as  I  watch  them  flying  up  out  of  the  distance,  those 
two  still,  swift  thoughts,  or  shots  of  cities  —  dark,  monstrous 
(it's  as  if  Springfield  and  Northampton  had  caught  some  people 
up  and  were  firing  them  at  each  other)  —  I  am  always  wonder- 
ing if  this  particular  time  there  will  not  be  a  report,  after  all, 
a  clang  on  the  landscape,  on  all  the  hiUs,  and  a  long  story  in  the 
Republican  the  next  morning. 

Then  they  softly  crash  together  and  pass  on  —  two  or  three 
quiet  whiffs  at  each  other  —  as  if  nothing  had  happened. 

I  always  feel  afterward  as  if  something  splendid,  some  great 
human  act  of  faith,  had  been  done  in  my  presence.  Those  two 
looming,  mighty  engines,  bearing  down  on  each  other,  making 
an  aim  so,  at  twenty  inches  from  death,  and  nothing  to  depend 
on  but  those  two  gleaming  dainty  strips  or  ribbons  of  iron 
— a  few  eighths  of  an  inch  on  the  edge  of  a  wheel  —  I  never  can 
get  used  to  it :  the  two  great  glowing  creatures,  full  of  thunder 
and  trust,  leaping  up  the  telegraph  poles  through  the  still  valley, 
each  of  them  with  its  little  streak  of  souls  behind  it;  immortal 
souls,  children,  fathers,  mothers,  smiling,  chattering  along 
through  Infinity  —  it  all  keeps  on  being  boundless  to  me,  and 
full  of  a  glad  boyish  terror  and  faith.  And  under  and  through  it 
all  there  is  a  kind  of  stern  singing. 

I  know  well  enough,  of  course,  that  it  is  a  platitude,  this 
meeting  of  two  trains  in  a  meadow,  but  it  never  acts  like  one. 
I  sometimes  stand  and  watch  the  engineer  afterward.  I  wonder 
if  he  knows  he  enjoys  it.  Perhaps  he  would  have  to  stop  to 
know  how  happy  he  was,  and  not  meet  trains  for  a  while.  Then 
he  would  miss  something,  I  think;  he  would  miss  his  deep 
joyous  daily  acts  of  faith,  his  daily  habits  of  believing  in  things 


AND  THE  MACHINE  STARTS  203rf 

—  in  steam,  and  in  air,  and  in  himself,  and  in  the  switchman, 
and  in  God. 

I  see  him  in  his  cab  window,  he  swings  out  his  blue  sleeve  at 
me!  I  like  the  way  he  stakes  everything  on  what  he  believes. 
Nothing  between  him  and  death  but  a  few  telegraph  ticks  — 
the  flange  of  a  wheel.  .  .  .  Suddenly  the  swing  of  his  train 
comes  up  like  the  swing  and  the  rhythm  of  a  great  creed.  It 
sounds  like  a  chant  down  between  the  mountains.  I  come 
into  the  house  lifted  with  it.  I  have  heard  a  man  believing, 
believing  mile  after  mile  down  the  valley.  I  have  heard  a  man 
believing  in  a  Pennsylvania  rolling  mill,  in  a  white  vapour,  in 
compressed  air  and  a  whistle,  the  way  Calvin  believed  in  God. 


BOOK  THREE 
LETTING  THE  CROWD  BE  BEAUTIFUL 

TO   WILBUR   WRIGHT   AND   WILLIAM   MARCONI 

Great  Spirit  —  Thou  who  in  my  being^s  burning  mesh 

Hath  wrought  the  shining  of  the  mist  through  and  through  the 

flesh. 
Who,  through  the  double-wondered  glory  of  the  dust 
Hast  thrust 

Habits  of  skies  upon  me,  souls  of  days  and  nights. 
Where  are  the  deeds  that  needs  must  be, 
The  dreams,  the  high  delights. 
That  I  once  more  may  hear  my  voice 
From  cloudy  door  to  door  rejoice  — 
May  stretch  the  boundaries  of  love 
Beyond  the  mumbling,  mock  horizons  of  my  fears 
To  the  faint-remembered  glory  of  those  years  — 
May  lift  my  soul 
And  reach  this  Heaven  of  thine 
With  mine?'' 

"Come  up  here,  dear  little  Child 
To  fly  in  the  clouds  and  winds  with  me,  and  play  with  the 
measureless  light! 


PART  ONE 

WISTFUL  MILLIONAIRES 

CHAPTER  I 

MR.  CARNEGIE  SPEAKS  UP 

AS  I  was  wandering  through  space  the  other  day  — ^just 
aeroplaning  past  on  my  way  over  from  Mars  —  I  came  sud- 
denly upon  a  neat,  snug  little  property,  with  a  huge  sign 
stuck  in  the  middle  of  it: 

The  Earth:  This  Desirable  Property  to  Let. 
Rockefeller,  Carnegie,  Morgan  &  Co. 

I  was  just  about  to  pass  it  by,  inferring  naturally  that  it  must 
be  a  mere  bank,  or  wholesale  house,  or  something,  when  it 
occurred  to  me  it  might  do  no  harm  to  stop  over  on  it,  and 
s^ee.  I  thought  I  might  at  least  drop  in  and  inquire  what 
kind  of  a  firm  it  was  that  was  handling  it,  and  what  was  their 
idea,  and  what,  if  anything,  they  thought  their  little  planet 
was  for,  and  what  they  proposed  to  do  with  it. 

I  found,  on  meeting  Mr.  Rockefeller  and  Mr.  Carnegie 
and  Mr.  Morgan,  to  my  astonishment,  that  they  did  not 
propose  to  do  anything  with  it  at  all.  They  had  merely 
got  it;  that  was  as  far  as  they  had  thought  the  thing  out  ap- 
parently —  to  get  it.  They  seemed  to  be  depending,  so 
far  as  I  could  judge,  in  a  vague,  pained  way,  on  somebody's 
happening  along  who  would  think  perhaps  of  something  that 
could  be  done  with  it. 

Of  course,  as  Mr.     Carnegie  (who  was  the  talking  mem- 

205 


206  CROWDS 

ber  of  the  firm)  pointed  out,  if  they  only  owned  a  part  of  it, 
and  could  sell  one  part  of  it  to  the  other  part  there  would 
still  be  something  left  that  they  could  do,  at  least  it  would 
be  their  line;  but  merely  owning  all  of  it,  so,  as  they  did, 
was  embarrassing.  He  had  tried,  Mr.  Carnegie  told  me, 
to  think  of  a  few  things  himself,  but  was  discouraged;  and 
he  intimated  he  was  devoting  his  life  just  now  to  pulling  him- 
self together  at  the  end,  and  dying  a  poor  man.  But  that 
was  not  much,  he  admitted,  and  it  was  really  not  a  very  great 
service  on  his  part  to  a  world,  he  thought  —  his  merely  dying 
poor  in  it. 

When  I  asked  him  if  there  was  anything  else  he  had  been 
able  to  think  of  to  do  for  the  world  — — 

"No,"  he  said,  "nothing  really;  nothing  except  chucking 
down  libraries  on  it  —  safes  for  old  books." 

"And  Mr.  Morgan.?  "  I  said. 

"Oh!  He  is  chucking  down  old  china  on  it,  old  pictures, 
and  things." 

"And  Mr.  Rockefeller.?" 

"Mussing  with  colleges,  some,"  he  said,  "just  now.  But 
he  doesn't,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  see  anything  —  not  of  his 
own  —  that  can  really  be  done  with  them,  except  to  make  them 
more  systematized  and  businesslike,  make  them  over  into 
sort  of  Standard  Oil  Spiritual  Refineries,  fill  them  with  mil- 
lions more  of  little  Rockefellers  —  and  they  won't  let  him 
do  that.  "Of  course,  as  you  might  see,  what  they  want  to 
do  practically  is  to  take  the  Rockefeller  money  and  leave 
the  Rockefeller  out.  Nobody  will  really  let  him  do  anything. 
Everything  goes  this  way  when  we  seriously  try  to  do  things. 
The  fact  is,  it  is  a  pretty  small,  helpless  business,  owning  a 
world,"  sighed  Mr.  Carnegie. 

"This  is  why  we  are  selling  out,  if  anybody  happens  along. 
Anybody,  that  is,  who  really  sees  what  this  piece  of  property 
is  for  and  how  to  develop  it,  can  have  it,"  said  Mr.  Carnegie, 
^and  have  it  cheap." 


MR.  CARNEGIE  SPEAKS  UP  207 

Mr.  Carnegie  spoke  these  last  words  very  slowly  and  wear- 
ily, and  with  his  most  wistful  look;  and  then,  recalling 
himself  suddenly,  and  handing  me  a  glass  to  look  at  New 
York  with  and  see  what  I  thought  of  it,  he  asked  to  be  ex- 
cused for  a  moment,  and  saying,  "I  have  fourteen  libraries 
to  give  away  before  a  quarter  past  twelve,"  he  hurried  out 
of  the  room. 


CHAPTER  II 
MR.  CARNEGIE  TRIES  TO  MAKE  PEOi»LE  READ 

I  FOUND,  as  I  was  studying  the  general  view  of  New  York 
as  seen  from  the  top  through  Mr.  Carnegie's  glass,  that  there 
appeared  to  be  a  great  many  dots  —  long  rows  of  dots  for 
the  most  part  —  possibly  very  high  buildings,  but  there  was 
one  building,  wide  and  white  and  low,  and  more  spread-out 
and  important-looking  than  any  of  the  others,  which  especi- 
ally attracted  my  attention.  It  looked  as  if  it  might  be  a 
kind  of  monument  or  mausoleum  to  somebody.  On  looking 
again  I  found  that  it  was  filled  with  books,  and  was  the  Car- 
negie Public  Library.  There  were  forty  more  Libraries  for 
New  York  Mr.  Carnegie  was  having  put  up,  I  was  told,  and  he 
had  dotted  them  —  thousands  of  them  —  almost  everywhere 
one  could  look,  apparently,  on  his  o\^n  particular  part  of 
the  planet. 

A  few  days  later,  when  I  began  to  do  things  at  a  closer 
range,  I  took  a  little  trip  to  New  York,  and  visited  the  Library; 
and  I  asked  the  man  who  seemed  to  have  it  in  charge,  who 
there  was  who  was  writing  books  for  Mr.  Carnegie's  Libraries 
just  now,  or  if  there  was  any  really  adequate  arrangement 
Mr.  Carnegie  had  made  for  having  a  few  great  books  writ- 
ten for  all  these  fine  buildings  —  all  these  really  noble  book- 
racks,  he  had  had  put  up.  The  man  seemed  rather  taken 
aback,  and  hesitated.  Finally,  I  asked  him  point  blank 
to  give  me  the  name  of  the  supposed  greatest  living  author 
who  had  written  anything  for  all  these  miles  of  Carnegie 
Libraries,  and  he  mentioned  doubtfully  a  certain  Mr.  Rud- 
yard  Kipling.     I  at  once  asked  for  his  books,  of  course,  and  sat 

208 


MR.  CARNEGIE  TRIES  TO  MAKE  US  READ  209 

down  without  delay  to  find  out  if  he  was  the  greatest  living 
author  the  planet  had,  what  it  was  he  had  to  say  for  it  and 
about  it,  and  more  particularly,  of  course,  what  he  had  to 
to  say  it  was  for. 

I  found  among  his  books  some  beautiful  and  quite  refined 
interpretations  of  tigers  and  serpents,  a  really  noble  inter- 
pretation or  conception  of  what  the  beasts  were  for  —  aU  the 
glorious  gentlemanly  beasts  —  and  of  what  machines  were 
for  —  all  the  young,  fresh,  mighty,  worshipful  engines  — 
and  what  soldiers  were  for.  But  when  I  looked  at  what 
he  thought  men  were  for,  at  what  the  planet  was  for, 
there  was  practically  almost  nothing.  The  nearest  I  came 
to  it  was  a  remark,  apparently  in  a  magazine  interview 
which  I  cannot  quote  correctly  now,  but  which  amounted 
to  something  like  this:  "We  will  never  have  a  great  world 
until  we  have  some  one  great  artist  or  poet  in  it,  who 
sees  it  as  a  whole,  focuses  it,  composes  it,  makes  a 
picture  of  it,  and  gives  the  men  who  are  in  it  a  vision  to 
live  for." 


Since  then  I  have  been  trying  to  see  what  Messrs.  Rocke- 
feller, Carnegie,  and  Morgan  could  do  to  produce  and  arrange 
what  seemed  to  me  the  one  most  important,  imperative, 
and  immediate  convenience  their  planet  could  have,  namely, 
as  Mr.  Kipling  intimated,  some  man  on  it,  some  great  creative 
genius,  who  would  gather  it  all  up  in  his  imagination  —  the 
beasts,  and  the  people,  and  the  sciences,  and  the  machines  — 
in  short,  the  planet  as  a  whole,  and  say  what  it  was  for.  It 
is  from  this  point  of  view"  that  I  have  been  drawn  into  writing 
the  following  pages  on  the  next  important  improvements  — 
what  one  might  call  the  spiritual  Unreal-Estate  Improve- 
ments, for  Messrs.  Rockefeller,  Carnegie,  and  ISIorgan's 
property  which  will  have  to  be  installed.  I  have  been  going 
over  the  property  more  or  less  carefully  in  my  own    way 


210  CROWDS 

since,  studying  it  and  noting  what  had  been  done  by  the 
owners,  and  what  possibly  might  be  done  toward  arranging 
authors,  inventors,  seers,  artists,  or  engineers  or  other 
efficient  persons  who  would  be  able  to  inquire,  to  think 
out  for  a  world,  to  express  for  it,  some  faint  idea  of  what 
it  was  for. 


CHAPTER  III 
MR.  NOBEL  TRIES   TO   MAKE   PEOPLE   WRITE 

NOT  unnaturally,  of  course,  I  turned  to  see  what  had  al- 
ready been  done  by  the  more  powerful  men  the  planet  had 
produced,  in  the  way  of  arranging  for  the  necessary  seers 
and  geniuses  to  run  the  world  with,  and  I  soon  found  that  by 
far  the  most  intelligent  and  far-seeing  attempt  that  had  been 
made  yet  in  this  direction  had  been  made  by  an  inspired,  or 
semi-inspired,  millionaire  in  Sweden,  named  Alfred  Nobel, 
an  idealist,  who  had  made  a  large  but  unhappy  fortune  out 
of  an  explosive  to  stop  war  with.  His  general  idea  had  been 
that  dynamite  would  make  war  so  terrible  that  it  would  shock 
people  into  not  fighting  any  more,  and  that  gradually  people, 
not  having  to  spend  their  time  in  thinking  of  ways  of  killing 
one  another,  would  have  more  time  than  they  had  ever  had 
before  to  think  of  other  and  more  important  things.  It  was 
the  disappointment  of  his  life  that  his  invention,  instead  of 
being  used  creatively,  used  to  free  men  from  fighting  and 
make  men  think  of  things,  had  been  used  largely  as  an  ar- 
rangement for  making  people  so  afraid  of  war  that  they  could 
not  think  of  anything  else.  Whichever  way  he  turned  he 
saw  the  world  in  a  kind  of  panic,  all  the  old  and  gentle- 
minded  nations  with  their  fair  fields,  their  factories  and  art  gal- 
leries, all  hard  at  work  piling  up  explosives  around  themselves 
until  they  could  hardly  see  over  them.  As  this  was  the  pre- 
cise contrary  of  what  he  had  intended,  and  he  had  not  man- 
aged to  do  what  he  had  meant  to  do  with  making  his  money, 
he  thought  he  would  try  to  see  if  he  could  not  yet  do  what 
he  had  meant  to  do  in  spending  it.     He  sat  down  to  write 

211 


212  CROWDS 

his  Will,  and  in  this  Will,  writing  as  an  inventor  and  a  man 
of  genius,  he  tried  to  express,  in  the  terms  of  money,  his  five 
great  desires  for  the  world.  He  wished  to  spend  forty  thousand 
dollars  a  year,  every  year  forever,  after  he  was  dead,  on  each 
of  these  five  great  desires.  There  were  five  great  Inventors  that 
he  wanted,  and  he  wanted  the  whole  world  searched  through 
for  them,  for  each  of  them,  once  more  every  year,  to  see  if 
they  could  be  found.  Mr.  Nobel  expressed  his  desire  for  these 
five  Inventors  as  people  often  manage  to  express  things  in 
wills,  in  such  a  way  that  not  everybody  had  been  sure  what 
he  meant.  There  seems  to  have  been  comparatively  little 
trouble,  from  year  to  year,  in  awarding  the  prizes  to  some  ad- 
equate inventor  in  the  domain  of  Peace,  of  Physics,  of  Chem- 
istry, and  of  Medicine;  but  the  Nobel  Prize  Trustees,  in  try- 
ing to  pick  out  an  award  each  year  to  some  man  who  could 
be  regarded  as  a  true  inventor  in  Literature,  have  met  with 
considerable  diflficulty  in  deciding  just  what  sort  of  a  man 
Alfred  Nobel  had  in  mind,  and  had  set  aside  his  forty  thou- 
sand dollars  for  when  he  directed  that  it  should  go  —  to 
quote  from  the  Will — "To  the  person  who  shall  have  pro- 
duced in  the  field  of  Literature  the  most  distinguished  work 
of  an  idealistic  tendency." 

Allen  Upward,  for  instance,  an  Englishman  unknown  in 
Stockholm,  invented  and  published  a  book  four  years  ago,  called 
the  "New  W^ord,"  which  was  so  idealistic  and  distinguished 
a  book,  and  so  full  of  new  ideas  and  of  new  combinations 
of  old  ideas,  that  there  was  scarcely  a  publisher  in  England 
who  did  not  instinctively  recognize  it,  who  did  not  see  that 
it  would  not  pay  at  once,  and  that  therefore  it  was  too  strange 
and  original  and  too  important  a  book  for  him  to  publish, 
and  after  a  long  delay  the  book  was  finally  printed  in  Geneva. 

A  copy  was  sent  to  the  Nobel  Prize  Trustees. 

One  would  have  thought,  looking  at  it  theoretically,  that 
here  was  precisely  the  sort  of  situation  that  Alfred  Nobel, 
who  had  been   the  struggling   inventor  of  a  great  invention 


MR.  NOBEL  TRIES  TO  MAKE  US  WRITE     213 

that  would  not  pay  at  once  himself,  would  have  been  look- 
ing for.  A  book  so  inventive,  so  far  ahead,  that  publishers 
praised  it  and  would  not  invest  in  it,  one  would  have 
imagined  to  be  the  one  book  of  all  others  for  which  Alfred 
Nobel  stood  ready  and  waiting  to  put  down  his  forty  thousand 
dollars. 

But  Mr.  Nobel's  forty  thousand  dollars  did  not  go  to  a 
comparatively  obscure  and  uncapitalized  inventor  who  had 
written  a  book  to  build  a  world  with,  or  at  least  a  great  pre- 
liminary design,  or  sketch,  toward  a  world.  The  Nobel  Prize 
Trustees,  instead  of  giving  the  forty  thousand  dollars  to  Allen 
Upward,  looked  carefully  about  through  all  the  nations  until 
their  eyes  fell  on  a  certain  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling.  And  when 
they  saw  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling,  piled  high  with  fame  and  five 
dollars  a  word,  they  came  over  quietly  to  where  he  was  and 
put  softly  down  on  him  forty  thousand  dollars  more. 

I  do  not  know,  but  it  is  not  inconceivable,  that  Kipling 
himself  would  rather  have  had  Allen  Upward  have  it. 

I  am  not  quarrelling  with  the  Trustees,  and  am  merely 
trying  to  think  things  out  and  understand.  But  it  certainly 
is  a  question  that  cannot  but  keep  recurring  to  one's  mind  — 
the  unfortunate,  and  perhaps  rather  unlooked-for,  way  in 
which  ^Ir.  Nobel's  WUl  works.  And  I  have  been  wondering 
what  there  is  that  might  be  done,  the  world  being  the  kind 
of  world  it  is,  which  would  enable  the  Nobel  Prize  Trustees 
to  so  administer  the  Will  that  its  practical  weight  on  the  side 
of  Idealism,  and  especially  upon  the  crisis  of  idealism  in 
young  authors,  would  be  where  Mr.  Nobel  meant  to  have  it. 

One  must  hasten  to  admit  that  Mr.  Upward's  book  is  open 
to  question;  that,  in  fact,  it  is  the  main  trait  of  Mr.  Upward's 
book  that  it  raises  a  thousand  questions;  and  that  it  would 
be  a  particularly  hard  book  for  most  men  to  give  a  prize  to, 
quietly  go  home,  and  sleep  that  night.  I  must  hasten  to 
admit  also  that,  judging  from  their  own  point  of  view,  the 
Nobel   Prize  Trustees   have   so   far   done   quite  well.     They 


214  CROWDS 

have  attained  a  kind  of  triumph  of  doing  safe  things  —  things 
that  they  could  not  be  criticised  for;  and  they  could  well 
reply  to  this  present  criticism  that  there  was  no  other  course 
that  they  could  take.  Unless  they  had  a  large  fund  for  but- 
ting through  all  nations  for  obscure  geniuses,  and  for  turn- 
ing up  stones  everywhere  to  look  for  embryo  authors  —  unless 
they  had  a  fund  for  going  about  among  the  great  newspapers, 
the  big  magazines,  and  peeping  under  them  through  all  the 
world  for  geniuses  —  and  unless  they  had  still  another  large 
fund  for  guaranteeing  their  decision  when  they  had  found 
one,  a  fund  for  convincing  the  world  that  they  were  right, 
and  that  they  were  not  wasting  their  forty  thousand  dollars 
—  the  Trustees  have  taken  a  fairly  plausible  position.  Their 
position  being  that,  in  default  of  perfectly  fresh,  brand-nev/ 
great  men,  and  in  view  of  the  fact,  in  a  world  like  this  that 
geniuses  in  it  are  almost  invariably,  and,  as  a  matter  of  course, 
lost  or  mislaid  until  they  are  dead,  much  the  best  and  safest 
thing  that  Trustees  of  Idealism  could  do  was  to  watch  the 
drift  of  public  opinion  in  the  different  nations,  to  adopt  the 
course  of  noting  carefully  what  the  world  thought  were  really 
its  great  men,  and  then  (at  a  discreet  and  dignified  distance, 
of  course)  tagging  the  public,  and  wherever  they  saw  a  crowd,  a 
rather  nice  crowd,  round  a  man,  standing  up  softly  at  the  last 
moment  and  handing  him  over  his  forty  thousand  dollars.  This 
has  been  the  history  of  the  Nobel  Trustees  of  Idealism,  thus  far. 

But  in  a  way,  we  are  all  the  trustees  of  idealism,  and  the 
problem  of  the  Nobel  Prize  Trustees  is  more  or  less  the  prob- 
lem of  all  of  us.  We  are  interested  as  well  as  they  in  try- 
ing to  find  out  how  to  recognize  and  reward  men  of  genius. 
What  would  we  do  ourselves  if  we  were  Nobel  Prize  Trustees? 
Precisely  what  was  it  that  Alfred  Nobel  intended  to  achieve 
for  Literature  when  he  made  this  bequest  of  forty  thousand 
dollars  a  year  in  his  Will,  for  a  work  of  Literature  of  an 
idealistic  tendency? 

To  take  a  concrete  case,  I  can  only  record  that  it  has  seemed 


MR.  NOBEL  TRIES  TO  MAKE  US  WRITE     215 

to  me  that  if  Alfred  Nobel  himself  could  have  been  on 
hand  that  particular  year,  and  could  have  read  Mr.  Upward's 
book,  he  would  have  given  the  prize  of  forty  thousand  dollars 
to  Allen  Upward.  He  would  not  have  given  the  prize  to 
Mr.  Kipling  —  he  would  have  given  it  twenty  years  before; 
but  in  this  particular  year  of  which  I  am  writing,  when  he 
saw  these  two  men  together,  I  beheve  he  would  have  given  the 
prize  to  Allen  Upward,  and  he  would  have  hurried. 

I  would  hke  to  put  forward  at  this  point  two  inquiries. 
First,  why  did  the  Trustees  not  award  the  prize  to  Allen 
Upward?     And  second,  what  would  have  happened  if  they  had? 

First,  the  Trustees  could  not  be  sure  that  Mr.  Upward 
in  his  work  of  genius  was  telling  the  truth. 

Second,  they  could  not  be  sure  that  the  world  would 
approve  of  his  having  forty  thousand  dollars  for  teUing  the 
truth.  Perhaps  the  world  would  have  rather  had  him  paid 
forty  thousand  dollars  for  not  telling  it. 

Third,  Mr.  Kipling  was  safe.  No  creative  work  had  to 
be  done  on  Kipling;  all  they  had  to  do  was  to  send  him  the 
cheque.  Great  crowds  had  swept  in  from  aU  over  the  world, 
and  nominated  Mr.  Kipling;  the  Committee  merely  had  to 
confirm  the  nomination. 

Fourth,  Mr.  Upward,  like  all  idealists,  like  all  men  who 
have  the  power  of  throwing  this  world  into  the  melting-pot 
and  bringing  it  out  new  again  partly  unrecognizable  (which, 
of  course,  is  the  regular  historical,  almost  conventional,  thing 
for  an  idealist  to  do  with  a  world),  bewildered  the  Nobel 
Prize  Committee.  They  could  not  be  sure  but  that  Mr. 
Upward's  next  book  would  be  thought  in  the  wrong,  and  make 
their  having  given  him  forty  thousand  dollars  to  write  it 
ridiculous. 


What  would  have  happened  if  the  Trustees  had  given  the 
prize  to  Mr.  Upward? 


216  CROWDS 

First,  practically  no  one  would  have  known  who  he  was, 
and  twenty-jBve  nations  would  have  been  reading  his  book 
in  a  week,  to  see  why  the  prize  was  given  to  him.  The  book 
would  have  been  given  the  most  widespread,  highly  stim- 
ulated, forty-thousand-dollar-power  attention  that  any  book 
in  any  age  has  had. 

Only  now  and  then  would  a  man  go  over  and  take  down  his 
old  Kiplings  from  the  shelf  and  read  them,  because  he  had 
heard  that  Mr.  Kipling  had  forty  thousand  dollars  more 
than  he  had  had  before. 

Secondly,  Mr.  Upward's  new  book  would  have  the  stimulus 
of  his  knowing  while  he  was  writing  it  that  every  word  would 
be  read  by  everybody.  All  the  draught  on  the  fire  of  his 
genius  of  the  whole  listening  world  would  result  in  a  work 
that  even  Mr.  Upward  himself  perhaps  would  hardly  believe 
he  had  written.  As  events  turned  out,  and  Mr.  Upward 
did  not  get  the  prize  there  might  be  many  reasons  to  believe 
that  his  next  book  might  be  out  of  focus,  might  be  a  mere 
petulant,  scolding  book,  his  exultation  spent  or  dwindled, 
because  his  last  tremendous  wager  —  that  the  world  wanted 
the  truth  —  was  lost. 

Scolding  in  a  book  means,  as  a  rule,  either  juvenility  or 
it  means  relapse  into  conscious  degeneration  of  the  soul  — 
the  focussing  and  fusing  power  in  a  man.  I  have  sometimes 
wondered  if  even  Christ,  if  He  had  not  died  in  His  thirty- 
third  year,  made  His  great  dare  for  the  world  on  the  cross 
early,  would  not  have  stopped  believing  so  magnificently 
in  other  people  at  about  forty  or  forty-five  or  so,  and  would 
not  have  spent  the  rest  of  His  days  in  railing  at  them,  and 
in  being  very  bitter  and  helpless  and  eloquent  about  Rome 
and  Jerusalem.  I  have  caught  myself  once  or  twice  being 
glad  Abraham  Lincoln  died  suddenly  just  when  he  did,  his 
great  faith  and  love  all  warm  in  him,  and  his  great  oath  for 
the  world  —  that  it  was  good  —  still  fresh  upon  his  lips ! 

Writing  a  book  like  Allen  Upward's  for  a  planet  with  a 


MR.  NOBEL  TRIES  TO  MAKE  US  WRITE     217 

vision  of  a  thousand  years  singing  splendidly  through  it, 
and  then  just  reading  it  all  alone  afterward  when  he  has 
written  it,  and  going  over  the  score  all  alone  by  himself,  would 
seem  to  be  a  good  deal  of  a  strain.  To  be  contradicted  out 
loud  and  gloriously  by  a  world  might  be  inspiring,  but  to 
be  contradicted  by  a  solid  phalanx  of  silent  nations,  trooping 
up  behind  one  another,  unanimous,  impervious,  is  enough  to 
make  any  radiant,  long-accumulated  genius  pause  in  full 
career,  question  himself,  question  his  vision  as  a  chimera, 
as  some  faintly  hghted  Northern  Lights  upon  the  world, 
that  would  never  mean  anything,  that  was  an  illusion,  that 
would  just  flicker  in  the  great  dark  once  more  and  go  out. 

I  do  not  say  that  this  is  true,  or  that  it  would  be  true  of 
Allen  Upward. 

But  I  have  read  his  book.     I  should  think  it  might  be  true. 

What  Alfred  Nobel  had  in  mind,  his  whole  idea  in  his  Will, 
it  seems  to  some  of  us,  was  to  put  in  his  forty  thousand  dollars 
at  the  working  end  of  some  man's  mind,  at  the  end  of  the 
man's  mind  where  the  forty  thousand  dollars  would  itself  be 
creative,  where  the  forty  thousand  dollars  would  get  into  the 
man,  and  work  out  through  the  man  and  through  his  gen- 
ius into  the  world.  It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  he  wanted 
to  put  his  forty  thousand  dollars  at  the  idle,  old  remember- 
ing end  of  a  man's  mind;  that  he  meant  it  should  be  used  as 
a  mere  reward  for  idealism.  I  doubt  if  it  even  so  much  as 
occurred  to  Alfred  Nobel,  who  was  an  ideaUst  himself,  that 
ideahsm,  after  a  man  had  managed  to  have  some  in  this  world, 
could  be  rewarded,  or  could  possibly  be  paid  for,  by  any  one. 
He  knew,  if  ever  a  man  knew,  that  idealism  was  its  own  re- 
ward, and  that  it  was  priceless,  and  that  any  attempt  to  re- 
ward it  with  money,  to  pay  a  man  for  it  after  he  had  had 
it,  and  after  it  was  all  over,  would  make  forty  thousand  dollars 
look  shabby,  or  at  least  pathetic  and  ridiculous.  What  he 
wanted  to  do  was  to  build  his  forty  thousand  dollars  over 
into  a  Man.     He  wanted  to  feel  that  this  money  that  he  had 


218  CROWDS 

made  out  of  dynamite,  out  of  destruction,  would  be  wrought, 
through  this  man,  into  exultation,  into  life.  He  had  pro- 
posed that  this  forty  thousand  dollars  should  become  po- 
etry in  this  man's  book,  that  it  should  become  light  and  heat, 
a  power-house  of  thought,  of  great  events.  What  Alfred 
Nobel  had  in  mind,  I  think,  with  his  little  forty  thousand 
dollars,  was  that  it  should  be  given  a  chance  to  become  an 
intimate  part  of  some  man's  genius;  that  it  should  become 
perhaps  at  last  a  Great  Book  —  that  great  foundry  of  men's 
souls,  where  the  moulds  of  History  are  patterned  out,  and  where 
the  hopes  of  nations  and  the  prayers  of  women  and  children 
and  of  great  men  are,  and  where  the  ideals  of  men  —  those 
huge  drive-wheels  of  the  world  —  are  cast  in  a  strange  light 
and  silence. 

I  wondered  if  they  could  have  thought  of  this  when  they 
voted  on  Allen  Upward's  book  that  day  three  years  ago  — 
those  twenty  grave,  quiet  gentlemen  in  f rockcoats  in  Stockholm ! 


I  have  picked  out  Mr.  Upward's  book  because  it  is  the 
most  difficult,  the  most  hazardous,  and  the  least  fortunate 
one  I  know,  to  make  my  point  with;  and  because  a  great 
many  people  will  get  the  reaction  of  disagreeing  with  me, 
and  feeling  about  it  probably,  the  way  the  Nobel  Prizes  Trustees 
did.  I  have  wanted  to  take  a  book  which  has  the  traits  in 
it  for  which  men  of  genius  are  persecuted  or  crucified  or  ignored 
—  our  more  modern  timid  or  anonymous  form  of  the  cross. 
If  Mr.  Upward  had  been  given  the  Prize  by  the  Nobel  Prize 
Trustees,  it  will  have  to  be  admitted  a  howl  would  have  gone 
up  round  the  world  that  would  not  have  quieted  down  yet; 
and  it  is  this  howl  that  Mr.  Nobel  intended  his  Prize  for, 
and  that  he  thought  a  man  would  need  about  forty  thousand 
dollars  to  meet. 

I  might  have  taken  any  one  of  several  other  books,  and 
they  would  have  illustrated  my    point  snugly  and  more  con- 


MR.  NOBEL  TRIES  TO  IVIAKE  US  WRITE     219 

veniently;  but  just  that  right  touch  of  craziness  that  Nobel 
had  in  mind,  and  that  goes  with  great  experiment  of  spirit 
—  the  chill,  Nietzsche-like  wildness,  that  bravado  before 
God  and  man  and  before  Time,  that  swinging  one's  self  out 
on  Eternity,  which  make  Upward  a  typical  man  of  genius, 

would  have  been  lacking.      K (whose  criticisms  of  books 

are  the  most  creative  ones  I  know)  said  of  Upward's  book 
that  he  felt  very  happy  and  strangely  emancipated  when 
he  read  it,  but  that  it  was  an  uncanny  experience,  as  if  he 
had  been  made  of  thin  air,  had  become  a  kind  of  aerated 

being,  a  psychic  effect  that  genius  often  has;  and  K  

admitted  to  me  confidentially  that  he  felt  that  possibly  he 
and  Upward  were  being  a  little  crazy  and  happy  together 
by  themselves,  breaking  out  into  infinite  space  so,  and  he 

took  the  book  over  to  W ,  and  left  it  on  his  desk  slink- 

ingly  and  half-ashamed  and  without  saying  anything  about 
it.     He  said  he  was  enormously  relieved  next  time  he  saw 

W ,    felt   as   if   he  had   just   been   pulled   out  of  Bedlam 

to  find  that  there  was  at  least  one  other  man  in  the  world 
apparently  in  his  right  mind,  who  valued  the  book  as  he  did. 
This  is  the  precise  feeling,  it  seems  to  me,  that  the  Nobel 
Prize  was  intended  to  champion  and  to  stand  by  and  tempor- 
arily defend  in  a  new  author  —  the  feeling  he  gives  us  of 
being  in  the  presence  of  unseen  forces,  of  incalculableness. 
It  was  this  way  Allen  Upward  has  of  taking  his  reader  apart 
or  up  into  a  high  place  (like  the  Devil),  and  dizzying  him, 
taking  away  his  breath  with  Truth,  that  Nobel  had  in  mind. 
He  wanted  to  spend  eight  thousand  pounds  a  year  on  pro- 
viding for  the  world  one  more  book  which  would  give  the 
ordinary  man  the  personal  feeling  of  being  with  a  genius, 
cold,  lonely,  cosmic  genius,  the  sense  of  a  chill  wind  of  All 
Space  Outside  blowing  through  —  a  book  which  is  a  sort 
of  God's  Wilderness,  in  which  ordinary  men  with  their  or- 
dinary plain  senses  round  them  move  about  dazed  a  little 
and  as  trees  walking  —  a  great,  gaunt,  naked  book. 


220  CROWDS 

Alfred  Nobel  was  the  inventor  of  an  explosive,  a  rearranger 
of  things  assumed  and  things  imbedded,  and  it  was  this  same 
expansive,  half-terrible,  half-sublime  power  in  other  men 
and  other  men's  books  he  wanted  to  endow  —  the  power 
to  free  and  mobilize  the  elements  in  a  world,  make  it  budge 
over  a  little  toward  a  new  one.  He  wanted  to  spend  forty 
thousand  dollars  a  year  on  the  man  in  literature  who  had 
the  pent-up  power  in  him  to  crash  the  world's  mind  open 
once  more  every  year  like  a  Seed,  and  send  groping  up  out 
of  it  once  more  its  hidden  thought. 

I  may  not  be  right  in  anticipating  the  eventual  opinion 
of  Allen  Upward's  book;  but  even  if  I  am  wrong,  it  will  have 
helped  perhaps  to  call  attention  to  the  essential  failure  of 
the  Nobel  Prize  Trustees  to  side  with  the  darers'and  experi- 
menters in  Hterature,  to  take  a  serious  part  in  those  great 
creative  centrifugal  movements  of  the  human  spirit  in  which 
men's  souls  (like  little  children's)  are  swept  out  into  strange 
spaces,  live  daily  in  the  great  neighbourhood  of  a  new  sky,  of  a  new 
dark,  of  a  new  light,  and  peek  into  the  windows  of  new  worlds. 
For  the  Sciences,  which  are  more  matter  of  fact  and  tangible, 
the  Nobel  Prize  is  functioning  more  or  less  as  Mr,  Nobel  in- 
tended, but  certainly  in  Literature  it  will  have  to  be  classed 
as  one  more  of  our  humdrum  regular  millionaire  arrangements 
for  patting  successful  people  expensively  on  the  back.  It  acts 
twenty  years  too  late,  falls  into  line  with  our  usual  worldly 
ornamental  D.  D.,  LL,  D.  habit,  and  has  become,  so  far  as 
.Literature  is  concerned,  a  mere  colossal,  kindly,  doddering  Old 
Age  Pension  from  a  few  gentlemen  in  Stockholm.  It  adds  itself 
as  one  more  futile  effort  of  men  of  wealth  —  or  world  owners  to 
be  creative  and  lively  with  money,  very  much  on  the  premises 
with  money,  after  they  are  dead. 


CHAPTER  IV 

PAPER  BOOKS,  IVIARBLE  PILLARS,    AND    WOODEN 

BOYS 

I  HAVE  sometimes  wished  that  Mr.  Carnegie  would  post 
the  follo\»ing  sign  up  on  his  Libraries,  on  the  outside  where 
people  are  passing,  and  on  the  inside  in  the  room  where  peo- 
ple sit  and  think : 

A  Million  Dollars  Reward. 

Wanted,  a  Great  Living  American  Author  for  my  Libraries  in 
THE  United  States.  At  present  our  great  author  in  America 
appears  to  have  been  lost  or  mislaid;  ant  one  finding  him,  or  ant 

ONE   that   might  DO   FOR  HIM    TEMPORARILY,  PLEASE  COMMUNICATE  WITH 
ME. 

Andrew   Carnegie. 

Mr.  Carnegie's  Libraries  must  be  a  source  of  constant 
regret  to  the  author  of  "Triumphant  Democracy."  They  are 
generally  made  up  of  books  written  in  the  Old  World.  It 
would  be  interesting  to  know  what  are  the  real  reasons  great 
Libraries  are  not  being  written  for  Mr.  Carnegie  in  America, 
and  what  there  is  that  Mr.  Carnegie  or  other  people  can 
do  about  it.  They  are  certainly  going  to  be  written  in  Amer- 
ica some  time,  and  certainly,  unless  the  best  and  greatest 
part  of  the  Carnegie  Library  of  the  future  is  to  be  the  Amer- 
ican part  of  it,  the  best  our  Carnegie  Libraries  will  do  for 
America  will  be  to  remind  us  of  what  we  are  not.  Unless 
we  can  make  the  American  part  of  Mr.  Carnegie's  Libraries 
loom  in  the  world  as  big  as  Mr.  Carnegie's  chimneys,  Amer- 
ica —  which  is  the  last  newest  experiment  station  of  the 
world  —  is  a  failure. 

221 


222  CROWDS 

It  has  occurred  to  me  to  try  to  express,  for  what  it  may 
be  worth,  a  point  of  view  toward  Triumphant  Democracy 
Mr.  Carnegie  may  have  inadvertently  overlooked. 

If  Mr.  Carnegie  would  establish  in  every  town  where  he 
has  put  a  Library,  by  endowment  or  otherwise,  a  Commis- 
sion, or  what  might  be  called  perhaps  a  Searching  Party, 
in  that  community,  made  up  of  men  of  inventive  and  creative 
temperament,  who  instinctively  know  this  temperament 
in  others  —  men  in  all  specialities,  in  all  walks  of  life,  who 
are  doing  things  better  than  any  one  wants  to  pay  them  to 
do  them  —  and  if  Mr.  Carnegie  would  set  these  men  to 
work,  in  one  way  and  another,  looking  up  boys  who  are  like 
them,  boys  about  the  town,  who  are  doing  things  better 
than  any  one  wants  to  pay  them  to  do  them  —  he  would 
soon  get  a  monopoly  of  the  idealism  of  the  world;  he  would 
collect  in  thirty-five  years,  or  in  one  generation,  an  array 
of  hving  great  men,  of  national  figures,  men  who  would  be 
monuments  to  Andrew  Carnegie,  as  compared  with  which 
his  present  hbraries,  big,  thoughtless,  innumerable,  hum- 
drum, sogging  down  into  the  past,  would  be  as  nothing.  Mr. 
Carnegie  has  given  forty  libraries  to  New  York;  and  I  venture 
to  say  that  there  is  at  this  very  moment,  running  round  the 
streets  of  the  great  city,  one  single  boy,  who  has  it  in  him 
to  conceive,  to  imagine,  and  hammer  together  a  new  world; 
and  if  Mr.  Carnegie  would  invest  his  fortune,  not  in  build- 
ings or  in  books,  but  in  buying  brains  enough  to  find  that 
boy,  and  if  the  whole  city  of  New  York  were  to  devote  itself 
for  one  hour  every  day  for  years  to  searching  about  and  find- 
ing that  boy,  to  seeing  just  which  he  is,  to  going  over  all  the 
other  boys  five  hours  a  day  to  pick  him  out,  it  would  be  — 
well,  all  I  can  say  is,  all  those  forty  libraries  of  Mr.  Car- 
negie's, those  great  proud  buildings,  would  do  well  if  they 
did  not  do  one  thing  for  six  years  but  find  that  boy! 

There  is  a  boy  at  this  very  moment  with  strings  and  marble^- 
and  a  nation  in  his  pocket,  a  system  of  railroads  —  a  boy 


PAPER  BOOKS,  MARBLE  PILLARS,  AND  BOYS  223 

with  a  national  cure  for  tuberculosis,  with  sun-engines  for 
everybody  —  there  is  a  boy  with  cathedrals  in  him  too,  no 
doubt  or  some  boy  like  young  Pinchot,  with  mountainsful 
of  forests  in  his  heart. 

This  is  what  Mr.  Carnegie  himself  would  like  to  do,  but 
with  his  big,  stiff,  clumsy  hbraries  trailing  their  huge,  sense- 
less brick-and-mortar  bodies,  their  white  pillars  and  things, 
about  the  country,  unmanned,  inert,  eyeless,  all  those  great 
gates  and  forts  of  knowledge,  Cohseums  of  paper,  and  with 
the  mechanical  people  behind  the  counters,  the  policemen 
of  the  books,  all  standing  about  protecting  them  —  with 
all  this  formidable  array,  how  can  such  a  boy  be  hunted  out 
or  drawn  in,  or  how  would  he  dare  go  tramping  in  through 
the  great  gates  and  hunting  about  for  himself.'*  He  could 
only  be  hunted  out  by  people  all  wrought  through  with  human 
experience,  men  and  women  who  would  give  the  world  to 
find  him,  who  are  on  the  daily  lookout  for  such  a  boy  — 
by  some  special  kind  of  eager  librarian,  or  by  disguised  teach- 
ers, anonymous  poets,  or  by  diviners,  by  expert  geniuses 
in  boys.  If  Mr.  Carnegie  could  go  about  and  look  up  and 
buy  up  wherever  he  went  these  men  who  have  this  boy -genius 
in  them,  deliver  them  from  empty,  helpless,  mere  getting-a- 
living  lives;  and  if  he  could  set  these  men,  and  set  them  about 
thickly,  among  the  books  in  his  hbraries  —  those  huge  an- 
atomies and  bones  of  knowledge  he  has  established  every- 
where, all  his  great  literary  steel-works  —  men  would  soon 
begin  to  be  discovered,  to    be  created,  to  be  built  in  libraries 

.     .     but  as  it  is  now.     .     .     . 

Gentle  Reader,  have  you  ever  stood  in  front  of  one  of  them, 
looked  up  at  the  windows,  thought  of  all  those  great  tiers, 
those  moulds  and  blocks  of  learning  on  the  shelves;  and 
have  you  never  watched  the  weary  people  that  dribble  in 
from  the  streets  and  wander  coldly  about,  or  sit  down  list- 
less in  them  —  in  those  mighty,  silent  empires  of  the  past? 
Have  you   never  thought  that  somewhere  all  about  them. 


224  CROWDS 

somewhere  in  this  same  Hbrary,  there  must  be  some  white, 
silent,  sunny  country  of  the  future,  full  of  children  and  of 
singing,  full  of  something  very  different  from  these  iron  walls 
of  wisdom?  And  have  you  never  thought  what  it  would 
mean  if  Mr.  Carnegie  would  spend  his  money  on  search  parties 
for  people  among  the  books,  or  what  it  would  mean  if  the 
entire  library,  if  all  the  books  in  it,  became,  as  it  were,  wired 
throughout  with  live,  splendid,  delighted  men  and  women, 
to  make  connections,  to  estabHsh  the  current  between  the 
people  and  the  books,  to  discover  the  people  one  by  one  and 
follow  them  to  their  homes,  and  follow  them  in  their  lives, 
and  take  out  the  latent  geniuses,  and  the  listless  engineers 
and  poets,  and  the  Kossuths,  Caesars,  the  Florence  Nightin- 
gales    .     .     .  ? 

It  is  only  by  employing  forces  that  can  be  made  extremely 
small,  invisible,  personal,  penetrating,  and  spiritual,  that 
this  sort  of  work  can  be  done.  It  must  be  delicate  and  won- 
derful workmanship,  like  the  magnet,  like  the  mighty  thistle- 
down in  the  wind,  like  electricity,  like  love,  like  hope  — 
sheer,  happy,  warm  human  vision  going  about  and  casting 
itself,  casting  all  its  still  and  tiny  might,  its  boundless  seed, 
upon  the  earth:  but  it  would  pay. 

The  same  people  too,  specialists  in  detecting  and  develop- 
ing inventors,  could  be  supplied  also  to  all  other  possible 
callings.  They  would  constitute  a  universal  profession, 
penetrating  all  the  others.  They  would  go  hunting  among 
foremen  and  in  machine  shops  for  the  misplaced  geniuses, 
tried  by  wrong  standards,  underpaid  for  having  other  gifts. 
They  would  keep  a  lookout  through  all  the  schools  and  col- 
leges, looking  over  the  shoulders  of  scolding  teachers  and 
absent  professors.  They  would  go  about  studying  the  play- 
grounds and  mastering  the  streets. 

We  do  not  a  little  for  the  Submerged  Tenth  and  the  sons 
of  the  poor,  and  we  have  schools  or  missions  for  the  sons 
of  the  rich,  but  one  of  the  things  we  need  next  to-day  is  that 


PAPER  BOOKS.  MARBLE  PILLARS,  AND  BOYS  225 

something  should  be  done  for  the  sons  of  the  great  neglected 
respectable  classes.  Far  more  important  than  one  more 
library  —  say  in  Denver,  for  instance  —  would  be  a  Denver 
Bureau  of  Investigation,  to  be  appointed,  of  high-priced, 
spirited  men,  of  expert  humanists,  to  study  difficulties,  and 
devise  methods  and  missions  for  putting  all  society  in  Denver 
through  filters  or  placers,  and  finding  out  the  rich  human 
ore,  finding  out  where  everybody  really  belonged,  and  what 
all  the  clever  misplaced  people  were  really  for.  Of  course 
it  would  take  money  to  do  all  this,  and  flocks  of  free  people 
who  are  doing  the  work  they  love.  But  it  is  not  book-racks, 
nor  paper,  nor  ink,  nor  stone  steps,  nor  white  pillars  —  it 
is  free  men  and  free  women  America  and  England  are  ask- 
ing of  their  Andrew  Carnegies  to-day. 

Mr.  Carnegie  has  not  touched  this  human  problem  in  his 
libraries.  If  Society  were  fitted  up  all  through  with  electric 
connections,  men  with  a  genius  for  discovering  continents 
in  people,  Columbuses,  boy-geniuses;  and  if  there  were  es- 
tabhshed  everywhere  a  current  between  every  boy  and  the 
great  world,  this  would  be  something  on  which  Mr.  Carnegie 
could  make  a  great  beginning  with  the  little  mite  of  his  for- 
tune. If  we  were  to  have  even  one  city  fitted  up  in  this  way, 
it  would  be  hard  to  say  how  much  it  would  mean  —  one  city 
with  enough  people  in  it  who  were  free  to  do  beautiful  things, 
free  to  be  curious  about  the  others,  free  to  follow  clues  of 
greatness,  free  to  go  up  the  streams  of  Society  to  the  still, 
faint  little  springs  and  beginnings  of  things.  It  would  soon 
be  a  memorable  city.  A  world  would  watch  it,  and  other 
cities  would  grope  toward  it.  Instead  of  this  we  have  these 
big,  hollow,  unmanned  libraries  of  Mr.  Carnegie's  every- 
where, with  no  people  practically  to  go  with  them,  no  great 
hive  of  happy  living  men  and  women  in  and  out  all  day  cross- 
fertilizing  boys  and  books. 

There  seems  to  be  something  unfinished  and  stolid  and 
brutal   about   a   Carnegie   Library   now.     The   spirit    of   the 


226  CROWDS 

garden  and  the  sea,  of  the  spring  and  the  Hght,  and  of  the 
child,  is  not  in  it.  They  have  come  to  seem  to  some  of  us 
mere  huge  Pittsburgs  of  brains  —  all  these  impervious,  un- 
wieldy, rolling-mills  of  knowledge.  I  should  think  it  would 
be  a  terrible  prospect  to  grow  old  with,  just  to  sit  and  see 
them  flocking  across  the  country  from  your  window,  all  these 
huge  smoke-stacks  of  books  in  their  weary,  sordid  cities; 
and  the  boys  who  might  be  great  men,  the  small  Lincolns 
with  nations  in  their  pockets,  the  little  Bells  with  worlds 
in  their  ears,  the  Pinchots  with  their  forests,  the  McAdoos 
and  Roosevelts,  the  young  Carnegies  and  Marconis  in  the 
streets! 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  HUMDRUM  FACTORY  AND  THE  TUMTY-TUM 

THEATRE 

MR.  ISRAEL  ZANGWILL  in  presiding  at  the  meeting 
of  the  Sociological  Society  the  other  night  remarked,  in  re- 
ferring to  inspired  millionaires,  that  as  a  rule  in  the  minds 
of  most  people  nowadays  a  millionaire  seemed  to  be  a  kind 
of  broken-off  person,  or  possibly  two  persons.  There  always 
seemed  to  have  to  be  a  violent  change  in  a  millionaire  some- 
where along  the  middle  of  his  life.  The  change  seemed  to 
be  associated  in  some  way,  Mr.  Zangwill  thought  with  his 
money.  He  reminded  one  of  the  patent-medicine  adver- 
tisements, "Before  and  After  Taking." 

I  have  been  trying  to  think  why  it  is  that  the  average  mil- 
lionaire reminds  people  —  as  Mr.  Zangwill  says  he  does  — 
of  a  patent-medicine  advertisement,  "  Before  and  After  Taking." 

I  have  thought,  since  Mr.  Zangwill  made  this  remark, 
of  getting  together  a  small  collection  of  pictures  of  million- 
aires —  two  pictures  of  each,  one  before  and  the  other  after 
taking  —  and  having  them  mounted  in  the  most  approved 
patent-medicine  style,  and  taking  them  down  to  Far  End 
and  asking  Mr.  Zangwill  to  look  them  over  with  me  and  see 
if  he  thought  —  he,  Israel  Zangwill,  the  novelist,  the  play- 
wright, the  psychologist  —  really  thought,  that  milUonaires 
"Before  and  After"  were  as  different  as  they  looked. 

I  imagine  he  would  say  —  and  practically  without  looking 
at  the  pictures  —  that  of  course  to  him  or  to  me  perhaps, 
or  to  any  especially  interested  student  of  human  nature, 
millionaires  are  not  really  different  at  all  "Before  and  After 

227 


228  CROWDS 

Taking";  that  they  merely  had  a  slightly  different  outer 
look.  They  would  merely  look  different,  Mr.  Zangwill  would 
say,  to  the  common  run  or  majority  of  people  —  the  people 
one  meets  in  the  streets. 

But  would  they.^ 

One  of  the  most  hopeful  things  that  I  have  been  thinking 
of  lately  is  that  the  people  —  the  ordinary  people  one  meets 
in  the  streets  —  are  beginning  quite  generally  to  see  through 
their  millionaires,  and  to  see  that  their  money  almost  never 
really  cures  them.  Most  very  rich  men,  indeed,  are  hav- 
ing their  times  now,  of  even  seeing  through  themselves;  and 
it  brings  me  up  abruptly  with  a  shock  to  think  that  the  or- 
dinary people  who  pass  in  the  streets  would  be  deceived  by 
thes3  simple  little  pictures  Before  and  After.  They  have 
been  deceived  until  lately,  but  are  they  being  deceived  now? 
I  would  like  to  see  the  matter  tested,  and  I  have  thought 
it  would  be  a  good  idea  to  take  my  small  collection  of  pict- 
ures of  millionaires  —  two  pictures  of  each,  one  Before  and 
the  other  After  Taking  —  to  a  millionaire  —  of  course  some 
really  reformed  or  cured  one  —  and  ask  him  to  pay  the 
necessary  expenses  in  the  columns  of  the  Times,  and  of  the 
Westminister  Gazette,  and  the  Daily  Chronicle,  and  other  rep- 
resentative London  journals  (all  on  the  same  morning),  of 
having  the  pictures  published.  We  could  then  take  what 
might  be  called  a  social,  human,  economic  inventory  of 
London:  ask  people  to  send  in  their  honest  opinions,  on  look- 
ing at  the  pictures,  as  to  whether  Money,  Before  and  After 
Taking,  does  or  does  not  produce  these  remarkable  cures 
in  millionaires.  I  very  much  doubt  if  Mr.  Zangwill  would 
be  found  to  be  right  in  his  estimate  of  our  common  people 
to-day. 

I  venture  to  believe  that  it  is  precisely  because  our  common 
people  are  seeing  that  millionaires  are  not  changed  Before 
and  After  Taking  that  the  majority  of  the  millionaires  we 
have  to-day  have  come  to  be  looked  upon  as  one  of  the  charges 


FACTORIES  AND  TUMTY-TUM  THEATRES    229 

—  one  of  the  great  spiritual  charges  and  burdens  modern 
Society  has  to  carry. 

Society  has  always  had  to  do  what  it  could  for  the  poor, 
but  in  our  modern  civilization,  in  a  new  and  big  sense,  we 
have  to  see  now  what  there  is,  if  possibly  anything,  that  can 
be  done  for  the  rich. 

We  have  come  to  have  them  now  almost  everywhere  about 
us  —  these  great  spiritual  orphans,  with  their  pathetic,  blind, 
useless  fortunes  piled  up  around  them;  and  Society  has  to 
support  them,  to  keep  them  up  morally,  keep  them  doing 
as  little  damage  as  possible,  and  has  to  allow  day  by  day 
besides  for  the  strain  and  structural  weakness  they  bring 
upon  the  girders  of  the  world  —  the  faith  of  men  in  men, 
and  the  credit  of  God,  which  alone  can  hold  a  world  together. 

It  is  not  denied  that  the  average  millionaire,  when  he  has 
made  his  money,  does  difiFerent-looking  things,  and  gathers 
different-looking  objects  about  him,  and  is  seen  in  different- 
looking  places.  And  it  is  not  denied  that  he  changes  in  more 
important  particulars  than  things.  He  quite  often  changes 
people,  the  people  he  is  seen  with  but  he  never  or  almost 
never  changes  himself.  He  is  not  one  man  when  he  is  put- 
ting money  into  his  pocket  and  another  when  he  is  taking 
it  out. 

We  keep  hoping  at  first  with  each  new  mere  millionaire 
that  when  he  gets  all  the  money  he  has  wanted  it  will  change 
him;  but  we  find  it  almost  never  does. 

Merely  reversing  the  motion  with  a  pocket  does  not  make 
a  man  a  new  and  beautiful  creature,  and  one  soon  sees  that 
the  typical  millionaire  is  governed  by  the  same  bargain  prin- 
ciples, is  bullied  and  domineered  over  by  the  same  personal 
limitations,  the  same  old  something-for-nothing  habits.  If 
he  had  the  habit,  while  getting  money  out  of  people,  of  get- 
ting the  better  of  them,  he  still  insists  on  getting  the  better 
of  people  when  he  gives  it  to  them  or  to  their  causes.  He 
takes  it  out  of  their  souls.     There  never  has  been  a  million- 


230  CROWDS 

aire  who  runs  his  business  on  the  old  humdrum  principle 
of  merely  making  all  the  money  he  can  who  does  not  run 
his  very  philanthropies  afterward  on  the  same  general  prin- 
ciple of  oppressing  everybody,  of  outwitting  everybody  — 
and  of  doing  people  good  in  a  way  that  makes  them  wish 
they  were  dead.  Philanthropy  as  a  philosophy,  and  even 
as  an  institution,  is  getting  to  be  nearly  futile  to-day,  for 
the  reason  that  millionaires  —  valid,  authentic  cases  of  mil- 
lionaires who  are  really  cured  —  who  are  changed  either 
in  their  motives  or  their  methods  with  regard  to  what  they 
do  with  money,  except  in  rare  cases,  do  not  exist. 

The  New  Theatre  in  New  York,  which  was  started  as  a 
kind  of  Polar  Expedition  to  discover  and  rescue  Dramatic 
Art  in  America,  failed  because  two  hundred  and  forty  mil- 
lionaires tried  to  help  it.  If  enough  millionaires  could  have 
been  staved  off  from  that  enterprise,  or  if  it  could  have  been 
taken  in  hand  either  by  fewer  or  more  select  millionaires 
cooperating  with  the  public  and  with  artists  of  all  classes. 
New  Theatre  of  New  York  would  not  have  been  obliged, 
as  it  has  been  since,  to  start  all  over  again  on  a  new 
basis.  The  blunders  in  creative  public  work  that  men  who 
get  rich  in  the  wrong  way  are  always  sure  to  make  had  to 
be  made  first.  They  nearly  always  have  to  be  made  first. 
There  is  hardly  a  single  enterprise  of  higher  social  value  in 
which  the  world  is  interested  to-day  which  is  not  being  gravely 
threatened  in  efficient  service  by  letting  in  too  many  mil- 
lionaires, and  by  paying  too  much  attention  to  what  they 
think.  If  our  people  were  generally  alive  to  the  terrific  same- 
ness and  monotony  of  a  millionaire's  life  "before  and  after," 
and  if  millionaires  were  looked  over  discriminatingly  before 
being  allowed  to  take  part  in  great  public  enterprises  like  the 
cinema,  for  instance,  the  newspapers,  the  hospitals,  the  theatres, 
there  is  hardly  any  limit  to  the  new  things  that  public  en- 
terprises would  begin  to  make  happen  in  the  world,  and  the 
new  men  that  would  begin  to  function  in  them. 


FACTORIES  AND  TUMTY-TUIM  THEATRES,  231 

Of  course,  if  what  a  great  vision  for  the  people  — i.e.,  a 
pubhc  enterprise  is  for,  is  to  make  money,  it  would  be 
different.  The  mere  millionaire  might  understand,  and  his 
understanding  might  help.  But  if  an  institution  is  founded 
(like  a  great  theatre)  to  be  a  superb  and  noble  master- 
piece of  understanding  and  changing  human  nature;  if 
it  is  founded  to  be  a  creative  and  dominating  influence,  to 
build  up  the  ideals  and  fire  the  enthusiasm  of  a  city,  to  lay 
the  foundations  of  the  daily  thoughts  and  the  daily  motives 
of  a  great  people,  the  mere  millionaire  finds,  if  he  tries 
to  manage  it,  that  he  is  getting  in  beyond  his  depth. 
A  man  who  has  made  his  money  by  exploiting  and  tak- 
ing advantage  of  the  public  can  only  be  expected,  in 
conducting  a  Theatre,  to  be  an  authority  on  how  to  ex- 
ploit a  public  and  take  advantage  of  it  stiU  more,  and  how 
to  make  it  go  to  the  play  that  merely  looks  like  the  play 
that  it  wants. 

Millionaires  as  a  class,  unless  they  are  men  who  have  made 
their  money  in  the  artist's  or  the  inventor's  spirit,  really 
ought  to  be  expected  by  this  time,  except  in  the  size  of  their 
cheques,  to  be  modest  and  thoughtful,  to  stand  back  a  little 
and  watch  other  people.  The  millionaires  themselves,  if 
they  thought  about  it,  would  be  the  first  to  advise  us  not 
to  pay  too  much  attention  to  them.  They  are  used  to  large 
things,  and  they  know  that  the  only  way  to  do,  in  conduct- 
ing great  enterprises,  is  to  select  and  use  men  (whether  mil- 
lionaires or  not)  for  the  particular  eflSciencies  they  have  de- 
veloped. If  we  are  conducting  what  is  called  a  charity,  we 
will  not  expect  that  a  millionaire  can  do  good  things  unless 
he  is  a  good  man.  He  spoils  them  by  picking  out  the  wrong 
people.  And  we  will  not  expect  him  to  do  artistic  things 
unless  he  has  lived  his  life  and  done  his  business  in  the  spirit 
and  the  temperament  of  the  artist.  He  will  not  know  which 
the  artists  are  or  what  the  artists  are  like  inside;  and  he  will 
not  like  them  and  they  will  not  like  him,  nor  will  they  be 


232  CROWDS 

interested  in  him  or  interested  in  working  with  him.  Every- 
thing that  artists  or  men  of  creative  temperament  tty  to  do 
with  the  common  run  of  millionaires  —  all  these  huge,  blind, 
imponderable  megatheriums,  stamping  along  through  life, 
ordering  people  about — ends  in  the  same  way  —  in  irksome- 
ness,  bewildered  vision,  fear,  compromise,  and  failure,  as 
seen  from  the  inside.  Seen  on  the  outside  or  before  the  public, 
of  course,  the  Institution  will  have  the  same  old,  bland,  familiar 
air  of  looking  successful  and  of  looking  intelligent,  and  yet 
of  being  uninteresting,  and  of  not  changing  the  world  by  a 
hair's  breadth. 

The  only  millionaires  who  should  be  allowed  to  have  a 
controlling  interest  in  public  enterprises  are  millionaires 
who  do  not  need  to  be  different  before  and  after  making  their 
money.  Everybody  is  coming  to  see  this,  sooner  or  later. 
It  is  already  getting  very  hard  to  raise  money  for  any  public 
enterprise  in  which  mere  millionaires  or  bewildered,  unhappy 
rich  men  are  known  to  have  a  controlling  interest.  The 
most  efficient  and  far-sighted  men  do  not  expect  anything 
very  decided  or  of  marked  character  from  such  enterprises, 
and  will  no  longer  lend  to  them  either  their  brains  or  their 
money.  Mere  millionaires  will  soon  have  to  conduct  their 
public  enterprises  quite  by  themselves,  and  they  will  then 
soon  fall  of  their  own  weight.  The  moment  men  are  put 
in  control  of  public  enterprises  by  the  size  of  their  brains 
instead  of  the  size  of  their  cheques,  the  whole  complexion 
of  what  are  known  as  our  public  enterprises  will  change, 
and  churches,  theatres,  hospitals,  settlements,  art  galleries, 
and  all  other  great  public  causes,  instead  of  boring  every- 
body and  teasing  everybody,  will  be  attracting  everybody 
and  attracting  everybody's  money.  They  will  be  full  of 
character,  courage,  and  vision.  Our  present  great,  vague, 
helpless,  plaintive  public  enterprises — one  third  art,  one 
third  millionaire,  one  third  deficit — drag  along  financially 
because    they    are    listless    compromises,    because    they    have 


FACTORIES  AND  TUMTY-TUM  THEATRES    233 

no  souls  or  vision,  and  are  not  interesting — not  even  inter- 
esting to  themselves. 

Men  with  creative  or  imaginative  quality,  and  courage, 
and  insight  into  ordinary  human  nature,  and  far-sighted- 
ness of  what  can  be  expected  of  ]3eople,  do  not  get  on  with 
the  ordinary  millionaire.  It  cannot  be  denied  that  million- 
aires and  artists  get  together  in  time;  but  the  particular  point 
that  seems  to  be  interesting  to  consider  is  how  the  million- 
aires and  artists  can  be  got  together  before  the  artists  are 
dead,  and  before  the  millionaries  stop  growing  and  stop  being 
creative  and  understanding  creative  men. 

It  might  be  well  to  consider  the  present  situation  in  the 
concrete — ^the  theatre,  for  instance — and  see  how  the  situa- 
tion lies,  and  where  one  would  have  to  begin,  and  how  one 
would  have  to  go  to  work  to  change  it. 

The  present  failure  of  the  theatre  to  encourage  what  is 
best  in  modem  art  is  due  to  the  fact  that  the  public  is  un- 
imaginative and  inartistic. 

If  a  public  is  unimaginative  and  inartistic,  the  only  way 
the  best  things  that  are  offered  can  succeed  with  them  is 
by  having  these  best  things  held  before  them  long  and  steadily 
enough  for  them  slowly  to  compare  them  with  other  things, 
and  see  that  they  are  better  than  the  other  things,  and  that 
they  are  what  they  want. 

Unimaginative  and  inartistic  people  do  not  know  what 
they  want.  If  things  are  tried  long  enough  with  them  they 
do.  When  they  have  been  tried  long  enough  with  them 
they  support  them  themselves. 

The  only  way  fine  things  can  be  tried  long  enough  is  with 
suflScient  capital. 

The  only  way  suflScient  capital  for  fine  things  can  be  ob- 
tained is  by  having  millionaires  who  appreciate  fine  things, 
and  believe  in  them,  and  believe  the  public  in  time  will  be- 
lieve in  them. 

The  only  way  in  which  a  millionaire  can  recognize  and  be- 


234  CROWDS 

lieve  in  the  fine  things  and  in  the  best  artists  is  by  being, 
in  spirit  and  temperament  at  least,  an  artist  himself. 

The  only  way  in  which  a  millionaire  can  be  an  artist  is 
to  work  every  day  in  the  spirit  in  which  the  artist  works. 

This  means  the  artist  in  business. 

(1)  The  artist  in  business  is  the  man  who  makes  things 
people  already  want  enough  to  make  money,  and  who  makes 
things  he  is  going  to  make  people  want  enough  to  make  new- 
values  and  to  be  of  some  use. 

(2)  The  artist  in  business  is  the  employer  who  makes  new 
things  and  men  together.  He  lets  the  men  who  make  new 
things  with  him  become  new  men;  and  when  the  things  are 
made,  they  go  forth  in  their  turn  and  make  new  men  and  make 
new  pubhcs.  New  publics  have  had  to  be  made  for  every- 
thing: for  the  first  umbrellas,  for  the  first  telephones,  the  first 
typewriters.  New  publics  have  had  to  be  made  for  Wagner, 
for  Sunlight  Soap,  for  Bernard  Shaw;  and  it  is  the  men  who 
make  new  publics  — ■  be  it  for  big  or  little  things  —  who  are 
artists.     They  are  in  spirit,  prophets,  kings,  and  world-builders. 

(3)  Incidentally,  the  artist  in  business  —  the  employer  who 
creates  new  values  and  is  creative  himself  —  will  like 
creative  men  in  his  factory,  and  will  treat  them  so  that  they 
will  put  their  creativeness  into  his  business;  he  not  only  will 
be  an  artist  himself,  but  he  will  have,  comparatively  speaking, 
a  factory  full  of  artists  working  with  him.  And  when  the 
factories  pour  out  the  men  at  night,  and  the  smoke  and  the 
murmur  cease,  and  the  windows  are  dark,  they  will  go  to 
creative  and  live  men's  plays. 

So  it  has  come  to  pass  that  the  modern  business  man  of 
the  artist  sort  holds  the  arts  of  modern  times  in  the  hollow 
of  his  hand.     He  is  a  past-master  of  creating  new  publics. 

(4)  The  artist  in  business  is  the  man  who  educates  and 
draws  out,  at  every  point  where  his  business  touches  them, 
every  day,  all  day,  the  men  with  whom  he  works.  He  edu- 
cates and  developes  the  men  who  make  the  things.     He  edu- 


FACTORIES  AND  TUMTY-TUM  THEATRES    235 

cates  and  develops  the  men  who  buy  them.  Even  the  people 
who  wish  they  had  bought  them,  are  educated  or  secreted, 
by  the  artist  in  business.  He  is  a  maker  of  new  publics, 
a  world-builder,  whichever  way  he  turns.  A  business  man 
who  merely  makes  for  people  what  they  want,  and  who  does 
not  get  the  prestige  with  men  of  making  for  them  things 
that  they  did  not  know  they  wanted,  is  a  failure  and  falls 
behind  in  his  business.  All  the  big  men  in  business  work 
in  future  tenses.  They  are  prophets,  historians,  and  they 
are  Now-men,  men  who  work  by  seeing  the  truth  all  round 
the  present  moment,  the  present  persons,  and  the  present 
market,  and  before  it  and  behind  it.  Millionaires  who  are 
making  their  money  in  this  spirit  will  understand  and  believe 
in  plays  that  are  written  in  this  spirit,  and  the  people  who 
work  for  such  employers  will  like  to  go  to  such  plays,  and 
the  theatre  managers,  instead  of  being  the  bullies  and  tyrants 
of  the  world  of  art,  will  be  held  in  the  power  of  the  men  who 
see  things  and  who  make  things — men  who  in  vast  sweeps 
called  audiences,  night  after  night,  make  new  men  upon  the 
earth. 


PART  TWO 

mON  MACHINES 

CHAPTER  I 

STEEPLES  AND  CHIMNEYS 

I  WENT  to  the  Durbar  the  other  night  in  cinema  colour  and 
saw  the  King  and  Queen  through  India.  I  had  found  my  way, 
with  hundreds  of  others,  into  the  gallery  of  the  Scala  Theatre, 
and  out  of  that  big,  still  rim  of  watchful  darkness  where  I  sat  I 
saw  —  there  must  have  been  thousands  of  them  —  crowds  of 
camels  running. 

And  crowds  of  elephants  went  swinging  past. 

I  watched  them  like  a  boy,  like  a  boy  standing  on  the  edge  of 
a  thousand  years  and  looking  off  at  a  world. 

It  was  stately  and  strange,  and  like  far  music  to  sit  quite  still 
and  watch  civilizations  swinging  past. 

Then  suddenly  it  became  near  and  human  —  the  spirit  of 
playgrounds  and  of  shouting  and  boyish  laughter  ran  through 
it.  And  we  watched  the  elephants,  naked  and  untrimmed, 
lolling  down  to  the  lake  and  lying  down  to  be  scrubbed  in  it  with 
comfortable  low  snortings  and  slow  rolling  in  the  water,  and  the 
men  standing  by  all  the  while  like  little  play-nurses  and  tending 
them,  their  big  bungling  babies,  at  the  bath.  A  few  minutes 
later  we  watched  the  same  elephants,  hundreds  of  them,  their 
mighty  toilets  made,  pacing  slowly  past,  swinging  their  gorgeous 
trappings  in  our  eyes,  rolling  their  huge  hoodahs  at  us,  and  all 
the  time  still  those  little  funny  dots  of  men  beside  them,  moving 
them  silently,  moving  them  invisibly  as  by  a  spirit,  as  by  a  kind 

£36 


STEEPLES  AND  CHIMNEYS  237 

of  awful  wireless  —  those  great  engines  of  the  flesh !  I  shall 
never  forget  it  or  live  without  it,  that  slow  pantomime  of  those 
mighty,  silent  Eastern  nations,  their  religions,  their  philosophies, 
their  wills,  their  souls,  moving  their  elephants  past  —  the  long 
panorama  of  it,  of  their  little  awful  human  wills,  all  those 
little  black,  helpless-looking  slits  of  Human  Will  astride  those 
mighty  necks! 

I  have  the  same  feehng  when  I  see  Count  ZeppeKn  with  his 
airship,  or  Grahame-^Miite  at  Hendon,  riding  his  vast  cosmic 
pigeon  up  the  sky;  and  it  is  the  same  feeling  I  have  with  the 
locomotives  —  those  unconscious,  forbidding,  coldly  obedient 
terrible  fellows!  Have  I  not  lain  awake  and  listened  to  them 
storming  through  the  night,  heard  them  out  there  ahead  working 
our  wills  on  the  blackness,  on  the  thick  night,  on  the  stars, 
on  Space,  and  on  Time  while  we  slept? 

My  main  feeling  at  the  Durbar  while  I  watched  those  splendid 
beasts  —  the  crowds  of  camels,  the  crowds  of  elephants  —  all 
being  driven  along  by  the  little,  faint,  dreamy,  sleepy-looking 
people  was,  "Why  don't  their  elephants  turn  around  on  them 
and  chase  them?" 

I  kept  thinking  at  first  that  they  would,  almost  any  minute. 

Our  elephants  chase  us  —  most  of  us.  Who  has  not  seen 
locomotives  coming  quietly  out  of  their  roundhouses  in  New 
York  and  begin  chasing  people,  chasing  whole  towns,  tearing 
along  with  them,  making  everybody  hurry  whether  or  no, 
speeding  up  and  ordering  around  by  the  clock  great  cities, 
everybody  alike,  the  rich  and  the  poor,  the  just  and  the  unjust, 
for  hundreds  of  miles  around?  In  the  same  way  I  have  seen, 
hundreds  of  times,  motor  cars  turning  around  on  their  owners 
and  chasing  them  —  chasing  them  fairly  out  of  their  lives. 
And  hundreds  of  thousands  of  little  wood-and-rubber  Things 
with  nickel  bells  whirring,  may  be  seen  ordering  around  peo- 
ple —  who  pay  them  for  it  —  in  any  city  of  our  modern 
world. 

Now  and  then  one  comes  on  a  man  who  keeps  a  telephone. 


238  CROWDS 

who  is  a  gentleman  with  it,  and  who  keeps  it  in  its  place,  but 
not  often. 

There  are  certain  questions  to  be  asked  and  to  be  settled  in 
any  civilization  that  would  be  called  great. 

First:  Do  the  elephants  chase  the  men  in  it.f*  Second: 
And  if  —  as  in  our  Western  civilization  —  the  men  have  made 
their  own  elephants,  why  should  they  be  chased  by  them.'' 

There  are  some  of  us  who  have  wondered  a  little  at  the 
comparative  inferiority  of  organ  music.  We  have  come  to  the 
conclusion  that  perhaps  organ  music  is  inferior  because  it  has 
been  largely  composed  by  organists,  by  men  who  sit  at  organ 
machines  many  hours  a  day,  and  who  have  let  their  organ 
machines  with  all  their  stops  and  pedals,  and  with  all  their 
stop-and-pedal-mindedness,  select  out  of  their  minds  the  tones 
that  organs  can  do  best  —  the  music  that  machines  like. 

Wagner  has  come  to  be  recognized  as  a  great  and  original 
composer  for  a  machine  age  because  he  would  not  let  his  imagi- 
nation be  cowed  by  the  mere  technical  limitations,  the  narrow- 
mindedness  of  brass  horns,  wooden  flutes,  and  catgut;  he  made 
up  his  mind  that  he  would  not  sing  violins.  He  made  violins 
sing  him. 

Perhaps  this  is  the  whole  secret  of  art  in  a  machine 
civilization. 

Perhaps  a  machine  civilization  is  capable  of  a  greater  art  than 
has  ever  been  dreamed  in  the  world  before,  the  moment  it 
stops  being  chased  by  its  elephants.  The  question  of  letting 
the  crowd  be  beautiful  in  our  world  of  machines  and  crowds 
to-day  turns  on  our  producing  Machine-Trainers. 

Men  possessed  by  watches  in  their  vest  pockets  cannot  be 
inspired,  men  possessed  by  churches  or  religion-machines 
cannot  be  prophets,  men  possessed  by  school-machines  cannot 
be  educators. 

The  reason  that  we  find  the  poet,  or  at  least  the  minor  poet, 
discouraged  in  a  machine  age  probably  is,  that  there  is  nothing 
a  minor  poet  can  do  in  it.     Why  should  nightingales,  poppies, 


STEEPLES  AND  CHIMNEYS  239 

and  dells  expect,  in  a  main  trial  of  strength,  to  compete  with 
machines?  And  why  should  human  beings  running  for  their 
souls  in  a  race  with  locomotives  expect  to  keep  very  long  from 
losing  their  souls? 

The  reason  that  most  people  are  discouraged  about  machinery 
to-day  is  that  this  is  what  they  think  a  machine  civilization  is. 
They  whine  at  the  machines.     They  blame  the  locomotive. 

A  better  way  for  a  man  to  do  would  be  to  stop  blaming  the 
locomotive,  and  stop  running  along  out  of  breath  beside  it,  and 
climb  up  into  the  cab. 

This  is  the  whole  issue  of  art  in  our  modern  civilization  — 
climbing  up  into  the  cab. 

First  come  the  Machine-Trainers,  or  poets  who  can  tame 
engines.     Then  the  other  poets. 

In  the  meantime,  the  less  we  hear  about  nightingales  and 
poppies  and  dells  and  love  and  above,  the  better. 

Poetry  must  make  a  few  iron-handed,  gentle-hearted,  mighty 
men  next.  It  is  because  we  demand  and  expect  the  beautiful 
that  we  say  that  poetry  must  make  men  next. 

The  elephants  have  been  running  around  in  the  garden 
long  enough. 


CHAPTER  II 

BELLS  AND  WHEELS 

WE  ARE  living  in  a  day  of  the  great  rebellion  of  the  ma- 
chines. Out  of  a  thousand  thousand  roundhouses  and  factories, 
vast  cities  and  nations  of  machines  on  the  land  and  on  the  sea 
have  risen  before  the  soul  of  man  and  said,  "We  have  served 
you;  now,  you  serve  us. " 

A  million  million  vulgar,  swaggering  Goliaths,  one  sees  them 
everywhere;  they  wave  their  arms  at  us  around  the  world,  they 
puff  their  white  breath  at  us,  they  spit  smoke  in  our  eyes,  line  up 
in  a  row  before  the  great  cities,  before  the  mighty-hearted 
nations,  and  say  it  again  and  again,  all  in  chorus,  "We  have 
served  you,  now,  you  serve  v^l 

It  has  come  to  sound  to  some  of  us  as  i  kind  of  chant  around 
our  lives. 

But  why  should  we  serve  them? 

I  have  seen  crowds  of  minor  poets  running,  their  little  boxes 
of  perfume  and  poetry,  their  cologne  water,  their  smelling-salts, 
in  their  hands. 

And,  of  course,  if  the  world  were  all  minor  poets  the  situation 
would  be  serious. 

And  I  have  seen  flocks  of  faint-hearted  temples,  of  big,  sulky, 
beautiful,  absent-minded  colleges,  looking  afraid.  Every  now 
and  then  perhaps  one  sees  a  professor  run  out,  throw  a  book  at 
the  machines,  and  run  back  again.  Oxford  still  looks  at  science, 
at  matter  itself,  tremulously,  with  that  same  old,  still,  dreamy 
air  of  dignity,  of  gentlemanly  disappointment. 

And  if  the  world  were  all  Oxford  the  situation  would  be 
serious. 

240 


BELLS  AND  WHEELS  241 

When  Oxford  with  its  hundred  spires,  its  little  beautiful  boy 
choirs  of  professors,  draws  me  one  side  from  the  Great  Western 
Railway  Station,  and  intones  in  those  still,  solemn,  lonely  spaces 
the  great  truth  in  my  ears,  that  machines  and  ideals  cannot  go 
together,  that  the  only  way  to  deal  with  ideals  is  to  keep  them 
away  from  machines,  my  only  reply  is  that  ideals  that  are  so 
tired  that  they  are  merely  devoted  to  defending  themselves, 
ideals  that  will  not  and  cannot  go  forth  and  be  the  breath  of 
the  machines,  ideals  that  cannot  and  will  not  master  the 
machines,  that  will  not  ride  the  machines  as  the  wind,  overrun 
matter,  and  conquer  the  earth,  are  not  ideals  for  gentlemen. 

At  least  they  are  not  ideals  that  can  keep  up  the  standard 
of  the  Oxford  gentleman, 

A  gentleman  is  a  man  who  is  engaged  in  expressing  his  best 
and  noblest  self  in  every  fibre  of  his  mind  and  every  fibre  of  his 
body.  He  makes  the  very  force  of  gravity  pulling  on  his  clothen 
express  him,  and  the  movements  of  his  feet  and  his  hands.  He 
gathers  up  his  rooms  into  his  will  and  all  the  appointments  of 
his  life  and  crowds  into  them  the  full  meaning  of  his  soul.  He 
makes  all  these  things  say  him. 

The  main  attribute  of  a  man  who  is  not  a  gentleman  is  that 
he  does  not  do  these  things,  that  he  cannot  inform  his  body  with 
his  spirit. 

I  go  back  to  the  Great  Western  Railway,  ugly  as  it  still  is. 
I  go  alone,  and  sadly  if  I  must,  and  for  a  little  time  —  without 
the  deep  bells  and  without  the  stained-glass  windows,  without 
all  that  dear,  familiar  beauty  I  have  loved  in  the  old  and  quiet 
quadrangles  —  I  take  my  stand  beside  the  Great  Western 
Railway!  I  claim  the  Great  W^estern  Railway  for  the  spirit 
of  man  and  for  the  will  of  God ! 

With  its  vast  shuttle  of  steam  and  shining  engines,  its  little, 
whispering  telegraph  office,  the  Great  Western  Railway  is  a 
part  of  my  body.  I  lay  my  wall  on  the  heart  of  London  with  it, 
or  I  sleep  in  the  old  house  in  Lynmouth  with  it.  I  am  the 
Great  Western  Railway,  and  the  Great  Western  Railway  is  Me. 


242  CROWDS 

And  from  the  heart  of  the  roar  of  London  to  the  slow,  sleepy 
surge  of  the  sea  in  my  window  at  Lynmouth  it  is  mine !  Though 
it  be  iron  and  wood,  switches,  whistles,  and  white  steam,  it  is 
my  body,  and  I  inform  it  with  my  spirit,  or  I  die.  With  the 
will  of  God  I  endow  it,  with  the  glory  of  the  world,  with  the 
desires  of  my  heart,  and  with  the  prayers  of  the  hurrying  men 
and  women. 

I  declare  that  that  same  glory  I  have  known  before,  and  that 
I  will  always  know,  and  will  never  give  up,  in  the  old  quiet 
quadrangles  of  Oxford  and  in  the  deep  bells  and  in  the  still 
waters,  as  in  some  strange,  new,  and  mighty  Child,  is  in  the 
Great  Western  Railway  too. 

When  I  am  in  the  train  it  sings.  Strangely  and  hoarsely  It 
sings!  I  lie  down  to  rest.  It  whistles  on  ahead  my  ideals 
down  the  slope  of  the  world.  It  roars  softly,  while  I  sleep,  my 
religion  in  my  ears. 


CHAPTER  III 
DEW  AND  ENGINES 

WHEN  I  was  small,  and  wanted  suddenly  to  play  tag  or 
duck-on-the-roek  I  had  a  little  square  half-mile  of  boys  near 
by  to  play  with. 

My  daughter  plays  tag  or  plays  dolls,  any  minute  she  likes, 
with  a  whole  city.  She  is  not  surprised  at  the  telephone;  she 
takes  it  for  granted  like  sunshine  and  milk.  It  is  a  part  of  the 
gray  matter  in  her  brain  —  a  whole  city,  six  or  seven  square 
miles  of  it.  A  little  mouthpiece  on  a  desk,  a  number,  and  two 
hundred  little  girls  are  hers  in  a  minute,  to  play  dolls  with> 
She  thinks  in  miles  when  she  plays,  where  I  thought  in  door- 
yards.  The  whole  city  is  a  part  of  the  daily,  hourly  furni- 
ture of  her  mind.  The  little  gray  molecules  in  the  structure 
of  her  brain  are  different  from  those  in  mine. 

I  have  seen  that  Man  moves  over  with  each  new  generation 
into  a  bigger  body,  more  awful,  more  reverent  and  free  than  he 
has  had  before. 

A  few  minutes  ago,  here  where  I  am  writing,  an  engine  all  in 
bright,  soft,  lit-up  green  with  little  lines  of  yellow  on  it  and 
flashing  silver  feet,  like  a  vision,  swept  past  —  through  my  still 
glass  window,  through  the  quiet  green  fields  —  like  a  great, 
swift,  gleaming  whisper  of  London.  And  now,  all  in  six  seconds, 
this  great  quiet  air  about  me  is  waked  to  vast  vibrations  of 
the  mighty  city.  Out  over  the  red  pines,  the  lonely  gorse 
fields,  I  have  seen  passing  the  spirit  of  the  Strand.  I 
have  seen  the  great  flocking  bridges  and  the  roar  about 
St.  Paul's  in  communion  with  the  tree-tops  and  with  the 
hedgerows    and   with   the   little   brooks,    all    in    six   seconds, 

243 


244  CROWDS 

when  an  engine,  with  its  vision  like  a  cloud  of  glory  swept 
past. 

And  yet  there  are  people  in  Oxford  who  tell  me  that  an 
engine  when  it  is  in  the  very  act  of  expressing  such  stupendous 
and  boundless  thoughts,  of  making  such  mighty  and  beautiful 
things  happen,  is  not  beautiful,  that  it  has  nothing  to  do  with 
art.  They  can  but  watch  the  machines,  the  earth  black  with 
them,  going  about  everywhere  mowing  down  great  nations 
and  rolling  under  the  souls  of  men. 

I  cannot  see  it  so.  I  see  a  thousand  thousand  engines  carrying 
dew  and  green  fields  to  the  stones  of  London.  I  see  the  desires 
of  the  earth  hastening.  The  ships  and  the  wireless  telegraph 
beckon  the  wills  of  cities  on  the  seas  and  on  the  sky.  With  the 
machines  I  have  taken  a  whole  planet  to  me  for  my  feet  and  for 
my  hands.  I  gesture  with  the  earth.  I  hand  up  oceans  to 
my  God. 


CHAPTER  IV 
DEAD  AS  A  DOOR  NAIL! 

THERE  are  people  who  say  that  machines  cannot  be  beauti- 
ful, and  cannot  make  for  beauty,  because  machines  are  dead. 

I  would  agree  with  them  if  I  thought  that  machines  were  dead. 

I  have  watched  in  spirit,  hundreds  of  years,  the  machines 
grow  out  of  Man  like  nails,  like  vast  antennae  —  a  kind  of 
enormous,  more  unconscious  sub-body.  They  are  apparently 
of  less  hvely  and  less  sensitive  tissue  than  tongues  or  eyes  or 
flesh;  and  hke  all  bones  they  do  not  renew,  of  course,  as  often 
or  as  rapidly  as  flesh.  But  the  difference  between  live  and  dead 
machines  is  quite  as  grave  and  quite  as  important  as  the  differ- 
ence between  Hve  and  dead  men.  The  generally  accepted  idea 
Df  a  live  thing  is,  that  it  is  a  thing  that  keeps  dying  and  being 
born  again  every  minute;  it  is  seen  to  be  alive  by  its  responsive- 
ness to  the  spirit,  to  the  intelhgence  that  created  it  and  that 
keeps  re-creating  it.  I  have  known  thousands  of  factories;  and 
every  factory  I  have  known  that  is  really  strong  or  efBcient  has 
scales  like  a  snake,  and  casts  off  its  old  self.  All  the  people 
in  it,  and  all  the  iron  and  wood  in  it,  month  by  month  are  being 
renewed  and  shedding  themselves.  Any  hve  factory  can 
always  be  seen  moulting  year  after  year.  A  hve  spirit  goes  all 
through  the  machinery,  a  kind  of  nervous  tissue  of  invention, 
of  thought. 

We  already  speak  of  live  and  dead  iron,  of  live  and  dead 
engines  or  half -dead  and  half-sick  engines,  and  we  have  learned 
that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  tired  steel.  What  oeople  do  to 
steel  makes  a  difference  to  it.  Steel  is  sensitive  to  people. 
My  human  spirit  grows  my  arm  and  moves  it  and  guides  it  and 

£45 


246  CROWDS 

expresses  itself  in  it,  keeps  re-creating  it  and  destroying  it;  and 
daily  my  soul  keeps  rubbing  out  and  writing  in  new  lines  upon 
my  face;  and  in  the  same  way  my  typewriter,  in  a  slow,  more 
stolid  fashion,  responds  to  my  spirit  too.  Two  men  changing 
typewriters  or  motor-cars  are,  though  more  subtly,  like  two 
men  changing  boots.  Sewing  machines,  pianos,  and  fiddles 
grow  intimate  with  the  people  who  use  them,  and  they  come 
to  express  those  particular  people  and  the  ways  in  which  they 
are  different  from  others.  A  Titian-haired  typewriter  girl  makes 
her  machine  move  differently  every  day  from  a  blue-eyed  one. 
Typewriters  never  like  to  have  their  people  take  the  liberty 
of  lending  them.  Steel  bars  and  wooden  levers  all  have  little 
mannerisms,  little  expressions,  small  souls  of  their  own,  habits 
of  people  that  they  have  hved  with,  which  have  grasped  the 
little  wood  and  iron  levers  of  their  wills  and  made  them  what 
they  are. 

It  is  somewhere  in  the  region  of  this  fact  that  we  are  going 
to  discover  the  great  determining  secret  of  modern  hfe,  of  the 
mastery  of  man  over  his  machines.  Man,  at  the  present 
moment,  with  all  his  new  machines  about  him,  is  engaged  in 
becoming  as  self-controlled,  as  self-expressive,  with  his  new 
machines,  with  his  wireless  telegraph  arms  and  his  railway 
legs,  as  he  is  with  his  flesh  and  blood  ones.  The  force  in 
man  that  is  doing  this  is  the  spiritual  genius  in  him  that  cre- 
ated the  machine,  the  genius  of  imperious  and  implacable  self- 
expression,  of  glorious  self-assertion  in  matter,  the  genius  for 
being  human,  for  being  spiritual,  and  for  overflowing  every- 
thing we  touch  and  everything  we  use  with  our  own  wills  and 
with  the  ideals  and  desires  of  our  souls.  The  Dutchman  has 
expressed  himself  in  Dutch  architecture  and  in  Dutch  art;  the 
American  has  expressed  himself  in  the  motor-car;  the  English- 
man has  expressed  himself,  has  carved  his  will  and  his  poetry 
upon  the  hills,  and  made  his  landscape  a  masterpiece  by  a  great 
nation.  He  has  made  his  walls  and  winding  roads,  his  rivers, 
his  very  treetops  express  his  deep,  silent  joy  in  the  earth.     So 


DEAD  AS  A  DOOR  NAIL  247 

the  great,  fresh  young  nations  to-day,  with  a  kind  of  new,  stern 
gladness,  implacableness,  and  hope,  have  appointed  to  their 
souls  expression  through  machinery.  Our  Engines  and  our 
radium  shall  cry  to  God!     Our  wheels  sing  in  the  sun! 

Machinery  is  our  new  art-form.  A  man  expresses  himself 
first  in  his  hands  and  feet,  then  in  his  clothes,  and  then  in  his 
rooms  or  in  his  house,  and  then  on  the  ground  about  him;  the 
very  hills  grow  like  him,  and  the  ground  in  the  fields  becomes  his 
countenance;  and  now,  last  and  furthest  of  all,  requiring  the 
liveliest  and  noblest  grasp  of  his  soul,  the  finest  circulation  of 
will  of  all,  he  begins  expressing  himself  in  his  vast  machines,  in 
his  three-thousand-mile  railways,  in  his  vast,  cold-looking 
looms  and  dull  steel  hammers.  With  telescopes  for  Mars-eyes 
for  his  spirit,  he  walks  up  the  skies;  he  expresses  his  soul  in 
deep  and  dark  mines,  and  in  mighty  foundries  melting  and 
re-moulding  the  world.  He  is  making  these  things  intimate, 
sensitive,  and  colossal  expressions  of  his  soul.  They  have 
become  the  subconscious  body,  the  abysmal,  semi-infinite  body 
of  the  man,  sacred  as  the  body  of  the  man  is  sacred,  and  as 
full  of  light  or  of  darkness. 

So  I  have  seen  the  machines  go  swinging  through  the  world. 
Like  archangels,  like  demons,  they  mount  up  our  desires  on  the 
mountains.  We  do  as  we  will  with  them.  We  build  Winchester 
Cathedral  all  over  again,  on  water.  We  dive  down  with  our 
steel  wheels  and  nose  for  knowledge  —  like  a  great  Fish  —  along 
the  bottom  of  the  sea.  We  beat  up  our  wills  through  the  air. 
We  fling  up,  with  our  religion,  with  our  faith,  our  bodies  on  the 
clouds.  We  fly  reverently  and  strangely,  our  hearts  all  still 
and  happy,  in  the  face  of  God ! 


CHAPIER  V 
AN  OXFORD  MAN  AND  AN  INCH  OF  IRON 

THE  whole  process  of  machine-invention  is  itself  the  most 
colossal,  spiritual  achievement  of  history.  The  bare  idea  we 
have  had  of  unravelling  all  creation,  and  of  doing  it  up  again  to 
express  our  own  souls  —  the  idea  of  subduing  matter,  of  making 
our  ideals  get  their  way  with  matter,  with  radium,  ether, 
antiseptics,  is  itself  a  reUgion,  a  poetry,  a  ritual,  a  cry  to  heaven. 
The  supreme,  spiritual  adventure  of  the  world  has  become  this 
task  that  man  has  set  himself,  of  breaking  down  and  casting 
away  forever  the  idea  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  matter 
belonging  to  matter  —  matter  that  keeps  on  in  a  dead,  stupid 
way,  just  being  matter.  The  idea  that  matter  is  not  all  alive 
with  our  souls,  with  our  desires  and  prayers,  with  hope,  terror, 
worship,  with  the  little  terrible  wills  of  men  and  the  spirit  of  God, 
is  already  irreligious  to  us.  Is  not  every  cubic  inch  of  iron  (the 
coldest-blooded  scientist  admits  it)  like  a  kind  of  little  temple, 
its  million  million  little  atoms  in  it  going  round  and  round  and 
round  dancing  before  the  Lord.? 

And  why  should  an  Oxford  man  be  afraid  of  a  cubic  inch  of 
iron,  or  afraid  of  becoming  like  it? 

I  daily  thank  God  that  I  have  been  allowed  to  belong  to  this 
generation.  I  have  looked  at  last  a  little  cubic  inch  of  iron  out 
of  countenance.  I  can  sit  and  watch  it,  the  little  cubic  inch  of 
iron,  in  its  still  coldness,  in  all  its  little  funny  play-deadness,  and 
laugh !  I  know  that  to  a  telescope  or  a  god,  or  to  me,  to  us,  the 
little  cubic  inch  of  iron  is  all  alive  inside,  that  it  is  whirhng  with 
will,  that  it  is  sensitive  in  a  rather  dead-looking  but  lively 
cosmic  way,  sensitive  like  another  kind  of  more  slowly  quivering 

248 


AN  OXFORD  MAN  AND  AN  INCH  OF  IRON    249 

flesh,  sensitive  to  moons  and  to  stars  and  to  heat  and  cold,  to 
time  and  space  and  to  human  souls.  It  is  singing  every  minute 
low  and  strange,  night  and  day,  in  its  little  grim  blackness,  of 
the  glory  of  Things.  I  am  filled  with  the  same  feeling,  the 
same  sense  of  kindred,  of  triumphant  companionship,  when 
I  go  out  among  them  and  watch  the  majestic  family  of  the 
machines,  of  the  engines,  those  mighty  Innocents,  those  new 
awful  sons  of  God,  going  abroad  through  all  the  world,  looking 
back  at  us  when  we  have  made  them,  unblinking  and  with- 
out sin! 

Like  rain  and  sunshine,  like  chemicals,  and  like  all  the  other 
innocent,  godlike  things,  and  like  waves  of  water  and  waves  of 
air,  rainbows,  starlight,  they  say  what  we  make  them  say. 
They  are  alive  with  the  life  that  is  in  us. 

The  first  element  of  power  in  a  man,  in  getting  control  of  his 
life  in  our  modern  era,  is  to  have  spirit  enough  to  know  what 
matter  is  like. 

The  Machine-Trainer  is  the  man  who  sees  what  the  machines 
are  like.  He  is  the  man  who  conceives  of  iron-and-wocd 
machines,  in  his  daily  habit  of  thought,  as  alive.  He  has  dis- 
covered ways  in  which  he  can  produce  an  impression  upon  iron 
and  wood  with  his  desires,  and  with  his  will.  He  goes  about 
making  iron-and-wood  machines  do  live  things. 

It  is  never  the  machines  that  are  dead. 

It  is  only  mechanical-minded  men  that  are  dead. 


CHAPTER  VI 
THE  MACHINES'  MACHINES 

THE  fate  of  civilization  is  not  going  to  be  determined 
by  people  who  are  morbidly  like  machines  on  the  one  hand, 
or  by  people  who  are  morbidly  unmechanical,  on  the  other. 

People  in  a  machine  civilization  who  try  to  live  without  being 
automatic  and  mechanical-minded  part  of  the  time  and  in 
some  things,  people  who  try  to  make  everything  they  do  artistic 
and  self -expressive  and  hand-made,  who  attend  to  all  their  own 
thoughts  and  finish  off  all  their  actions  by  hand  themselves, 
soon  wish  they  were  dead. 

People  who  do  everything  they  do  mechanically,  or  by 
machinery,  are  dead  already. 

It  is  bad  enough  for  those  of  us  who  are  trying  to  live  our 
lives  ourselves  —  real,  true,  hand-made  individual  lives  —  to 
have  to  fight  all  these  machines  about  us  trying  daily  to  roar 
and  roll  us  down  into  humdrum  and  nothingness,  without 
having  to  fight  besides  all  these  dear  people  we  have  about  us 
too,  who  have  turned  machines,  even  one's  own  flesh  and  blood. 
Does  not  one  see  them  —  see  them  everywhere  —  one's  own 
flesh  and  blood,  going  about  like  stone-crushers,  road-rollers, 
lifts,  lawn-mowers.? 

Between  the  morbidly  mechanical  people  and  the  morbidly 
unmechanical  people,  modern  civilization  hangs  in  the  balance. 

There  must  be  some  way  of  being  just  mechanical  enough, 
and  at  the  right  time  and  right  place,  and  of  being  just  un- 
mechanical enough  at  the  right  time  and  right  place.  And 
there  must  be  some  way  in  which  men  can  be  mechanical  and 
unmechanical  at  will. 

250 


THE  MACHINE'S  MACHINES  251 

The  fate  of  civilization  turns  on  men  who  recognize  the  nature 
of  machinery,  who  make  machines  serve  them,  who  add  the 
machines  to  their  souls,  like  telephones  and  wireless  telegraph, 
or  to  their  bodies,  like  radium  and  railroads,  and  who  know 
when  and  when  not  and  how  and  how  not  to  use  them  —  who 
are  so  used  to  using  machines  quietly  and  powerfully,  that  they 
do  not  let  the  machines  outwit  them  and  unman  them. 

Who  are  these  men? 

How  do  they  do  it? 

They  are  the  Machine-Trainers,  The  men  who  understand 
people-machines,  who  understand  iron  machines,  and  who 
understand  how  to  make  people-machines  and  iron  machines 
run  softly  together. 


CHAPTER  VII 
THE  MEN'S  MACHINES 

THERE  was  a  time  once  in  the  old  simple  individual  days 
when  drygoods  stores  could  be  human.  They  expressed,  in  a 
quiet,  easy  way,  the  souls  of  the  people  who  owned  them. 

When  machinery  was  invented  and  when  organization  was 
invented  —  machines  of  people  —  drygoods  stores  became  vast 
selling  machines. 

We  then  faced  the  problem  of  making  a  drygoods  store  with 
twenty -five  hundred  clerks  in  it  as  human  as  a  drygoods  store 
with  fifteen. 

This  problem  has  been  essentially  and  in  principle  solved. 
At  least  we  know  it  is  about  to  be  solved.  We  are  ready  to 
admit  —  most  of  us  —  that  it  is  practicable  for  a  department 
store  to  be  human.  Everything  the  man  at  the  top  does  ex- 
presses his  human  nature  and  his  personality  to  his  clerks.  His 
clerks  become  twenty -five  hundred  more  of  him  in  miniature. 
What  is  more,  the  very  stuff  in  which  the  clerks  in  department 
stores  work  —  the  thing  that  passes  through  their  hands,  is 
human,  and  everything  about  it  is  human,  or  can  be  made 
human;  and  all  the  while  vast  currents  of  human  beings,  huge 
Mississippis  of  human  feeling,  flow  past  the  clerks  —  thousands 
and  thousands  of  souls  a  day,  and  pour  over  their  souls,  making 
them  and  keeping  them  human.     The  stream  clears  itself. 

But  what  can  we  say  about  human  beings  in  a  mine,  about 
the  practicability  of  keeping  human  twenty-five  hundred  men 
in  a  hole  in  the  ground?  And  how  can  a  mine-owner  reach 
down  to  the  men  in  the  hole,  make  himself  felt  as  a  human 
being  on  the  bottom  floor  of  the  hole  in  the  ground? 

io2 


THE  MEN'S  MACHINES  253 

In  a  department  store  the  employer  expresses  himself  to  his 
clerks  through  every  one  of  the  other  twenty -five  hundred;  they 
mingle  and  stir  their  souls  and  hopes  and  fears  together,  and  he 
expresses  himself  to  all  of  them  through  them  all. 

But  in  a  mine,  two  men  work  all  alone  down  in  the  dark 
hole  in  the  ground.  Thousands  of  other  men,  all  in  dark  holes, 
are  near  by,  with  nothing  but  the  dull  sound  of  picks  to  come 
between.  In  thousands  of  other  holes  men  work,  each  with 
his  helper,  all  alone.  The  utmost  the  helper  can  do  is  to  grow 
like  the  man  he  works  with,  or  like  his  own  pick,  or  like  the 
coal  he  chips  out,  or  hke  the  black  hole.  The  utmost  the  man 
who  mines  coal  can  do,  in  the  way  of  being  human,  is  with  his 
helper. 

In  a  factory,  for  the  most  part,  the  only  way,  during  working 
hours,  an  employer  can  express  himself  and  his  humanness  to 
his  workman  is  through  the  steel  machine  he  works  with  — 
through  its  being  a  new,  good,  fair  machine  or  a  poor  one.  He 
can  only  smile  and  frown  at  him  with  steel,  be  good  to  him 
in  wheels  and  levers,  or  now  and  then  perhaps  through  a  fore- 
man pacing  down  the  aisles. 

The  question  the  modern  business  man  in  a  factory  has  to 
face  is  very  largely  this:  "I  have  acres  of  machines  all  roaring 
my  will  at  my  men.  I  have  leather  belts,  printed  rules,  white 
steam,  pistons,  roar,  air,  water  and  fire  and  silence  to  express 
myself  to  my  workmen  in.  I  have  long  monotonous  swings  and 
sweeps  of  cold  steel,  buckets  of  melted  iron,  strips  of  wood, 
bells,  whistles,  clocks  —  to  express  myself,  to  express  my  human 
spirit  to  my  men.  Is  there,  or  is  there  not,  any  possible  way 
in  which  my  factory  with  its  machines  can  be  made  as  human 
and  as  expressive  of  the  human  as  a  department  store?" 

This  is  the  question  that  our  machine  civilization  has  set 
itself  to  answer. 

All  the  men  with  good  honest  working  imaginations,  the 
geniuses  and  the  freemen  of  the  world,  are  setting  themselves 
the  task  of  answering  it. 


254  CROWDS 

Some  say,  "  Machines  are  on  the  necks  of  the  men.  We  will 
take  the  machines  away." 

Others  say,  "We  will  make  our  men  as  good  as  our  machines. 
We  will  make  our  inventions  in  men  catch  up  with  our  inven- 
tions in  machines." 

We  naturally  turn  to  the  employer  first  as  having  the  first 
chance.  What  is  there  an  employer  can  do  to  draw  out  the 
latent  force  in  the  men,  evoke  the  divine,  incalculable  passion 
sleeping  beneath  in  the  machine-walled  minds,  the  padlocked 
wills,  the  dull  unmined  desires  of  men?  How  can  he  touch  and 
wake  the  solar  plexus  of  labour? 

If  any  employer  desires  to  get  into  the  inner  substance  of 
the  most  common  type  of  workman,  be  an  artist  with  him, 
express  himself  with  him  and  change  the  nature  of  that  sub- 
stance, give  it  a  different  colour  or  light  or  movement  so  that 
he  will  work  three  times  as  fast,  ten  times  as  cheerfully  and 
healthfully,  and  with  his  whole  body  and  soul,  spirit,  and  how 
is  he  going  to  do  it? 

Most  employers  wish  they  could  do  this.  If  they  could 
persuade  their  men  to  believe  in  them,  to  begin  to  be  willing 
to  work  with  them  instead  of  against  them,  they  would  do  it. 

What  form  of  language  is  there,  whether  of  words  or  of 
actions,  that  an  employer  can  use  to  make  the  men  who  work 
nine  hours  a  day  for  him  and  to  whom  he  has  to  express 
himself  across  acres  of  machines,  believe  in  him  and  under- 
stand him? 

The  modern  employer  finds  himself  set  sternly  face  to  face, 
every  day  of  his  life,  with  this  question.  All  civilization  seems 
crowding  up  day  by  day,  seems  standing  outside  his  office  door 
as  he  goes  in  and  as  he  goes  out,  and  asking  him  —  now  with 
despair,  now  with  a  kind  of  grim,  implacable  hope,  "Do  you 
believe,  or  do  you  not  believe,  a  factory  can  be  made  as  human 
as  a  department  store?  " 

This  question  is  going  to  be  answered  first  by  men  who  know 
what  iron  machines  really  are,  and  what  they  are  really  for, 


THE  MEN'S  MACHINES  255 

and  how  they  work  —  who  know  what  people-machines  really 
are,  and  what  they  are  really  for,  and  how  they  work.  They 
will  base  all  that  they  do  upon  certain  resemblances  and  certain 
differences  between  people  and  machines. 

They  will  work  the  machines  of  iron  according  to  the  laws 
of  iron. 

They  will  work  the  machines  of  men  according  to  the  laws 
of  human  nature. 

There  are  certain  facts  in  human  nature,  feelings,  enthusiasms 
and  general  principles  concerning  the  natural  working  relation 
between  men  and  machines,  that  it  may  be  well  to  consider  in 
the  next  chapter  as  a  basis  for  a  possible  solution. 

What  are  our  machines  after  all?  How  are  the  machines  like 
us?  And  on  what  theory  of  their  relation  to  us  can  machines 
and  men  expect  in  a  world  like  this  to  run  softly  together? 
These  are  the  questions  men  are  going  to  answer  next.  In 
the  meantime,  I  venture  to  believe  that  no  man  who  is  morose 
to-day  about  the  machines,  or  who  is  afraid  of  machines  in 
our  civilization  —  because  they  are  machines  —  is  likely  to  be 
able  to  do  much  to  save  the  men  in  it. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  BASEMENT  OF  THE  WORLD 

EVERY  man  has,  according  to  the  scientists,  a  place  in  the 
small  of  his  back  which  might  be  called  roughly,  perhaps,  the 
soul  of  his  body.  All  the  little  streets  of  the  senses  or  avenues 
of  knowledge,  the  spiritual  conduits  through  which  he  lives  in 
this  world,  meet  in  this  little  mighty  brain  in  the  small  of  a 
man's  back. 

About  nine  hundred  millions  of  his  grandfathers  apparently 
make  their  headquarters  in  this  little  place  in  the  small  of  his 
back. 

It  is  in  this  one  little  modest  unnoticed  place  that  he  is 
supposed  to  keep  his  race-consciousness,  his  subconscious  mem- 
ory of  a  whole  human  race,  and  it  is  here  that  the  desires  and 
the  delights  and  labours  of  thousands  of  years  of  other  people 
are  turned  off  and  turned  on  in  him.  It  is  the  brain  that  has 
been  given  to  every  man  for  the  heavy  everyday  hard  work 
of  living.  The  other  brain,  the  one  with  which  he  does  his 
thinking  and  which  is  kept  in  an  honoured  place  up  in  the 
cupola  of  his  being,  is  a  comparatively  light-working  organ, 
merely  his  own  private  personal  brain  —  a  conscious,  small,  and 
supposably  controllable  affair.  He  holds  on  to  his  own  partic- 
ular identity  with  it.  The  great  lower  brain  in  the  small  of 
his  back  is  merely  lent  to  him,  as  it  were,  out  of  eternity  —  while 
he  goes  by. 

It  is  like  a  great  engine  which  he  has  been  allowed  the  use  of 
as  long  as  he  can  keep  it  connected  up  properly  with  his  cerebral 
arrangements. 

This  appears  to  be  mainly  what  the  cerebral  brain  is  for, 

256 


THE  BASEMENT  OF  THE  WORLD  257' 

this  keeping  the  man  connected  up.  It  acts  as  a  kind  of  stop- 
cock for  one's  infinity,  for  screwing  on  or  screwing  off  one's 
vast  race-consciousness,  one's  all-humanityness,  all  those  un- 
sounded deeps  or  reservoirs  of  human  energy,  of  hope  and 
memory,  of  love,  of  passionate  thought,  of  earthly  and  heavenly 
desire  that  are  lent  to  each  of  us  as  we  slip  softly  by  for  seventy 
years,  by  a  whole  human  race. 

A  human  being  is  a  kind  of  factory.  The  engine  and  the 
works  and  all  the  various  machines  are  kept  in  the  basement, 
and  he  sends  down  orders  to  them  from  time  to  time,  and  they 
do  the  work  which  has  been  conceived  up  in  the  headquarters. 
He  expects  the  works  down  below  to  keep  on  doing  these  things 
without  his  taking  any  particular  notice  of  them,  while  he 
occupies  his  mind,  as  the  competent  head  of  a  factory  should, 
with  the  things  that  are  new  and  different  and  special  and  that 
his  mind  alone  can  do  —  the  things  which,  at  least  in  their 
present  initial  formative  or  creative  stage,  no  machines  as  yet 
have  been  developed  to  do,  and  that  can  only  be  worked  out 
by  the  man  up  in  the  headquarters  himself  personally,  by  the 
handiwork  of  his  own  thought. 

The  more  a  human  being  develops,  the  more  delicate,  sensi- 
tive, strong,  and  efficient,  the  more  spirit-informed  once  for  all 
the  machines  in  the  basement  are.  As  he  grows,  the  various 
subconscious  arrangements  for  discriminating,  assimilating  and 
classifying  material,  for  pumping  up  power,  light,  and  heat  to 
headquarters,  all  of  which  can  be  turned  on  at  will,  grow  morf 
masterful  every  year.  They  are  found  aU  slaving  away  for 
him  dimly  down  in  the  dark  while  he  sleeps.  They  hand  him 
up  in  his  very  dreams  new  and  strange  powers  to  live  and 
know  with. 

The  men  who  have  been  the  most  developed  of  all,  in  this 
regard,  civiUzation  has  always  selected  and  set  apart  from  the 
others.     It  calls  these  men,  in  their  generation,  men  of  genius. 

Ordinary  men  do  not  try  to  compete  with  men  of  genius. 

The  reason  that  people  set  the  genius  apart  and  do  not  try 


258  CROWDS 

to  compete  with  him  is  that  he  has  more  and  better  machinery 
than  they  have.  It  is  always  the  first  thing  one  notices  about 
a  man  of  genius  —  the  incredible  number  of  things  that  he 
manages  to  get  done  for  him,  apparently  the  things  that  he 
never  takes  any  time  off,  like  the  rest  of  us,  to  do  himself.  The 
subconscious,  automatic,  mechanical  equipment  of  his  senses, 
the  extraordinary  intelligence  and  refinement  of  his  body, 
the  way  his  senses  keep  his  spirit  informed  automatically 
and  convey  outer  knowledge  to  him,  the  power  he  has  in  return 
of  informing  this  outer  knowledge  with  his  spirit,  with  his  will 
with  his  choices,  once  for  all,  so  that  he  is  always  able  afterward 
to  rely  on  his  senses  to  work  out  things  beautifully  for  him  quite 
by  themselves,  and  to  hand  up  to  him,  when  he  wants  them, 
rare,  deep,  unconscious  knowledge  —  all  the  things  he  wants 
to  use  for  what  his  soul  is  doing  at  the  moment  —  it  is  these 
that  make  the  man  of  genius  what  he  is.  He  has  a  larger  and 
better  factory  than  others,  and  has  developed  a  huge  subcon- 
scious service  in  mind  and  body.  Having  all  these  things  done 
for  him,  he  is  naturally  more  free  than  others  and  has  more 
vision  and  more  originality,  his  spirit  is  swung  free  to  build 
new  worlds  —  to  take  walks  with  God,  until  at  last  we  come  to 
look  upon  him,  upon  the  man  of  genius,  a  little  superstitiously. 
We  look  up  every  little  while  from  doing  the  things  ourselves 
that  he  gets  done  for  him  by  his  subconscious  machinery,  and 
we  wonder  at  him,  we  wonder  at  the  strange,  the  mighty  feats 
he  does,  at  his  thousand-leagued  boots,  at  his  apparent  every- 
whereness.  His  songs  and  joys,  sometimes,  to  us,  his  very 
sorrows,  look  miraculous. 

And  yet  it  is  all  merely  because  he  has  a  factory,  a  great 
automatic  equipment,  a  thousand  employee-sense  perceptions, 
down  in  the  basement  of  his  being,  doing  things  for  him  that 
the  rest  of  us  do,  or  think  we  are  obliged  to  do  ourselves,  and 
give  up  all  of  our  time  to.  He  is  not  held  back  as  we  are,  and 
moves  freely.  So  he  dives  under  the  sea  familiarly,  or  takes 
Deeps  at  the  farther  side  of  the  stars,  or  he  flies  in  the  air,  or 


THE  BASEMENT  OF  THE  WORLD  259 

he  builds  unspeakable  railroads  or  thinks  out  ships  or  sea-cities, 
or  he  builds  books,  or  he  builds  little  new  still-undreamed-of 
worlds  out  of  chemistry,  or  he  unravels  history  out  of  rocks, 
or  plants  new  cities  and  mighty  states  without  seeming  to  try, 
or  perhaps  he  proceeds  quietly  to  be  interested  in  men,  in  all 
these  funny  little  dots  of  men  about  him;  and  out  of  the  earth 
and  sky,  out  of  the  same  old  earth  and  sky  everybody  else  had 
had,  he  makes  new  kinds  and  new  sizes  of  men  with  a  thought 
like  some  mighty,  serene  child  playing  with  dolls ! 

It  is  generally  supposed  that  the  man  of  genius  rules  history 
and  dictates  the  ideals,  the  activities  of  the  next  generation, 
writes  out  the  specifications  for  the  joys  and  sorrows  of  a  world, 
and  lays  the  ground-plans  of  nations  because  he  has  an  inspired 
mind.  It  is  really  because  he  has  an  inspired  body,  a  body 
that  has  received  its  orders  once  for  all,  from  his  spirit.  We 
would  never  wonder  that  everything  a  genius  does  has  that  vivid 
and  strange  reality  it  has,  if  we  realized  what  his  body  is  doing 
for  him,  how  he  has  a  body  which  is  at  work  automatically 
drinking  up  the  earth  into  everything  he  thinks,  drinking  up 
practicability,  art  and  technique  for  him  into  everything  he 
sees  and  everything  he  hopes  and  desires.  And  every  year  he 
keeps  on  adding  a  new  body,  keeps  on  handing  down  to  his 
basement  new  sets,  every  day,  of  finer  and  yet  finer  things  to 
do  automatically.  The  great  spiritual  genius  becomes  great  by 
economizing  his  consciousness  in  one  direction  and  letting  it 
fare  forth  in  another.  He  converts  his  old  inspirations  into 
his  new  machines.  He  converts  heat  into  power,  and  power 
into  light,  and  comes  to  live  at  last  as  almost  any  man  of  genius 
can  really  be  seen  living  —  in  a  kind  of  transfigured  or  lighted- 
up  body.  The  poet  transmutes  his  subconscious  or  machine 
body  into  words;  and  the  artist,  into  colour  or  sound  or  into 
carved  stone.  The  engineer  transmutes  his  subconscious  body 
into  long  buildings,  into  aisles  of  windows,  into  stories  of  thought- 
ful machines.  Every  great  spiritual  and  imaginative  genius  is 
seen,  sooner  or  later,  to  be  the  transmuted  genius  of  some  man's 


260  CROWDS 

body.  The  things  in  Leonardo  da  Vinci  that  his  unconscious, 
high-spirited,  automatic  senses  gathered  together  for  him,  piled 
up  in  his  mind  for  him,  and  handed  over  to  him  for  the  use  of 
his  soul,  would  have  made  a  genius  out  of  anybody.  It  is  not 
as  if  he  had  had  to  work  out  every  day  all  the  old  details  of  being 
a  genius,  himself. 

The  miracles  he  seems  to  work  are  all  made  possible  to  him 
because  of  his  thousand  man-power,  deep  subconscious  body, 
his  tremendous  factory  of  senuous  machinery.  It  is  as  if  he 
had  practically  a  thousand  men  all  working  for  him,  for 
dear  life,  down  in  his  basement,  and  the  things  that  he  can  get 
these  men  to  attend  to  for  him  give  him  a  start  with  which 
none  of  the  rest  of  us  could  ever  hope  to  compete.  We  call 
him  inspired  because  he  is  more  mechanical  than  we  are,  and 
because  his  real  spiritual  life  begins  where  our  lives  leave  off. 

So  the  poets  who  have  filled  the  world  with  glory  and  beauty 
have  been  free  to  do  it  because  they  have  had  more  perfect, 
more  healthful  and  improved  subconscious  senses  handing  up 
wonder  to  them  than  the  rest  of  us  have. 

And  so  the  engineers,  living,  as  they  always  live,  with  that 
fierce,  silent,  implacable  curiosity  of  theirs,  woven  through 
their  bodies  and  through  their  senses  and  through  their  souls, 
have  tagged  the  Creator's  footsteps  under  the  earth,  and  along 
the  sky,  every  now  and  then  throwing  up  new  little  worlds  to 
Him  like  His  worlds,  saying,  "  Look,  O  God,  look  at  this  ! " 
—  the  engineers  whose  poetry  is  too  deep  to  look  poetic  have 
all  done  what  they  have  done  because  the  unconscious  and 
automatic  gifts  of  their  senses,  of  the  powers  of  their  observa- 
tion, have  swung  their  souls  free,  given  them  long  still  reaches 
of  thought  and  vast  new  orbits  of  desire,  like  gods. 

All  the  great  men  of  the  world  have  always  had  machinery. 

Now,  everybody  is  having  it.  The  power  to  get  little  things, 
innumerable,  omnipresent,  for-ever-and-ever  things,  tiny  just-so 
things,  done  for  us  automatically  so  that  we  can  go  on  to  our 
inspirations  is  no  longer  to-day  the  special  prerogative  of  men 


THE  BASEMENT   OF  THE  WORLD  261 

of  genius.  It  is  for  all  of  us.  Machinery  is  the  stored-up 
spirit,  the  old  saved-up  inspiration  of  the  world  turned  on  for 
every  man.  And  as  the  greatness  of  a  man  turns  on  his  com- 
mand over  machinery,  on  his  power  to  free  his  soul  by  making 
his  body  work  for  him,  the  greatness  of  a  civilization  turns 
upon  its  getting  machines  to  do  its  work.  The  more  of  our 
living  we  can  learn  to  do  to-day,  automatically,  the  more  in- 
spired and  creative  and  godlike  and  unmechanical  our  civiliza- 
tion becomes. 

Machinery  is  the  subconscious  mind  of  the  world. 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  GROUND  FLOOR  FOLKS 

I  WOULD  not  have,  if  I  could  afford  it,  a  thing  in  my  house 
that  is  not  hand-made.  I  have  come  to  beHeve  that  machinery 
is  going  to  make  it  possible  for  everybody  to  have  hand-made 
things  in  their  homes,  things  that  have  been  made  by  people 
who  love  to  make  them,  and  by  people  who,  thanks  to  the  ma- 
chines, are  soon  bound  to  have  time  to  make  them.  Some 
will  have  gifts  for  hand-made  furniture,  others  for  hand-made 
ideas.  Perhaps  people  will  even  have  time  for  sitting  down  to 
enjoy  hand-made  ideas,  to  enjoy  hand -made  books  —  and  enjoy 
reading  books  by  hand.  We  may  have  time  for  following  an 
author  in  a  book  in  the  slow,  old,  deep,  loving,  happy,  hand- 
made fashion  we  used  to  know  —  when  we  have  enough  ma- 
chines. 

It  looks  as  if  it  might  be  something  like  this. 

Every  man  is  going  to  spend  his  mornings  in  the  basement 
of  society,  taking  orders  and  being  a  servant  and  executing 
automatically,  like  a  machine  if  need  be,  the  will  of  the  world, 
making  what  the  world  wants  in  the  way  it  wants  it,  expressing 
society  and  subordinating  himself.  In  the  afternoon  he  shall 
come  up  out  of  the  basement,  and  take  his  stand  on  the  ground 
floor  of  the  world,  stop  being  a  part  of  the  machinery,  and  be 
a  man,  express  himself  and  give  orders  to  himseK  and  do 
some  work  he  loves  to  do  in  the  way  he  loves  to  do  it,  express 
his  soul  in  his  labour,  and  be  an  artist.  He  will  not  select  his 
work  in  the  morning,  or  select  his  employer,  or  say  how  the  work 
shall  be  done.  He  will  himself  be  selected,  like  a  young  tree 
or  like  an  iron  nail,  because  he  is  the  best  made  and  best  fitted 

262 


THE  GROUND  FLOOR  FOLKS       263 

thing  at  hand  to  be  used  in  a  certain  place  and  in  a  certain 
way. 

When  the  man  has  been  selected  for  his  latent  capacities, 
his  employer  sets  to  work  on  him  scientifically  and  according 
to  the  laws  of  physics,  hygiene,  conservation  of  energy,  the 
laws  of  philosophy,  human  nature,  heredity,  psychology,  and 
even  metaphysics,  teaches  the  man  how  to  hold  his  hands,  how 
to  lift,  how  to  sit  down,  how  to  rest,  and  how  to  breathe,  so  that 
three  times  as  much  work  can  be  got  out  of  him  as  he  could 
get  out  of  himself.  A  mind  of  the  highest  rank  and,  if  necessary , 
thirty  minds  of  the  highest  rank,  shall  be  at  his  disposal,  shall 
be  lent  him  to  show  him  how  his  work  can  be  done.  The 
accumulated  science  and  genius,  the  imagination  and  ex- 
perience, of  hundreds  of  years,  of  all  climates,  of  all  countries, 
of  all  temperaments  shall  be  heaped  up  by  his  employers, 
gathered  about  the  man's  mind,  wrought  through  his  limbs, 
and  help  him  to  do  his  work. 

All  labour  down  in  the  basement  of  society  shall  be  skilled 
labour.  The  brains  of  men  of  genius  and  of  experts  shall  be 
pumped  into  labour  from  above  until  every  man  in  the  base- 
ment shall  earn  as  much  money  in  three  hours  a  day  as  he 
formerly  had  earned  in  nine. 

Between  the  time  a  man  saves  by  having  machinery  and  the 
time  he  saves  by  having  the  brains  of  great  men  and  geniuses 
to  work  with,  it  will  be  possible  for  men  to  do  enough  work  for 
other  people  down  in  the  basement  of  the  world  in  a  few  hours 
to  shut  the  whole  basement  up,  if  we  want  to,  by  three  o'clock. 
Every  nlan  who  is  fit  for  it  shall  spend  the  rest  of  his  time  in 
planning  his  work  himself  and  in  expressing  himself,  and  in 
creating  hand-made  and  beautiful,  inspired  and  wilful  things 
like  an  artist,  or  like  a  slowed-down  genius,  or  at  least  like  a 
man  or  like  a  human  being. 

Every  man  owes  it  to  society  to  spend  part  of  his  time  in 
expressing  his  own  soul.  The  world  needs  him.  Society  can- 
not afford  to  let  him  merely  give  to  it  his  feet  and  his  hands. 


264  CROWDS 

It  wants  the  joy  in  him,  the  creative  desire  in  him,  the  slow, 
stupid,  hopeful  initiative,  in  him  to  help  run  the  world.  Society 
wants  to  use  the  man's  soul  too  —  the  man's  will.  It  is  going 
to  demand  the  soul  in  a  man,  the  essence  or  good-will  in  him, 
if  only  to  protect  itself,  and  to  keep  the  man  from  being 
dangerous.  Men  who  have  lost  or  suppressed  their  souls,  and 
who  go  about  cursing  at  the  world  every  day  they  live  in  it,  are 
not  a  safe,  social  investment. 

But  while  every  man  is  going  to  see  that  he  owes  it  to  society 
to  use  a  part  of  his  time  in  it  in  expressing  himself,  his  own 
desires,  in  his  own  way,  he  is  going  to  see  also  that  he  owes  it 
to  society  to  spend  part  of  his  time  in  expressing  others  and 
in  expressing  the  desires  and  the  needs  of  others.  The  two 
processes  could  be  best  effected  at  first  probably  by  alternating, 
by  keeping  the  man  in  equilibrium,  balancing  the  mechanical 
and  the  spiritual  in  his  life.  Eventually  and  ideally,  he  will 
manage  to  have  time  in  a  higher  state  of  society  to  put  them 
together,  to  express  in  the  same  act  at  the  same  time,  and  not 
alternating  or  reciprocally,  himself  and  others.  And  he  will 
succeed  in  doing  what  the  great  and  free  artist  does  already. 
He  will  make  his  individual  self-expression  so  great  and  so 
generous  that  it  is  also  the  expression  of  the  universal  self. 

Every  man  will  be  treated  according  to  his  own  nature. 
Doubtless  some  men  have  not  brains  enough  in  a  week  to  supply 
them  for  one  hour  a  day  of  self -directed  work.  It  would  take 
them -five  hours  a  day  to  think  how  to  do  one  hour's  worth  of 
work.  Men  who  prefer,  as  many  will,  not  to  think,  and  who 
like  the  basement  better,  can  substitute  in  the  basement  for 
their  sons,  and  buy  if  they  like,  the  freedom  of  sons  who  prefer 
thinking,  who  would  like  to  work  harder  than  their  fathers 
would  care  to  work,  up  on  the  ground  floor  of  the  world.  But 
as  time  goes  on,  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  every  man  will  climb  up 
slowly,  and  will  belong  less  and  less  of  his  time  to  the  staff 
that  borrows  brains,  and  more  and  more  of  his  time  to  the  staff 
that  hands  brains  down,  and  that  directs  the  machinery  of  the 


THE  GROUND  FLOOR  FOLKS  255 

world.  The  time  of  alternation  in  dealing  with  different  call- 
ings will  probably  be  adjusted  differently,  and  might  be  made 
weeks  instead  of  days,  but  the  principle  would  be  the  same. 
The  forces  that  are  going  to  help,  apparently,  in  this  evolution 
will  be  the  labour  exhange  —  the  centre  for  the  mobilization 
of  labour,  the  produce  exchange,  the  inventor's  spirit  in  the 
labour  unions  and  emplayers'  associations,  and  the  gradual 
organization  by  inventors  of  the  common  vision  of  all  men, 
and  setting  it  at  work  on  the  supreme  task  of  modern  life  — 
the  task  of  drawing  out,  evoking  each  particular  man  in  the 
world,  and  in  behalf  of  all,  freeing  him  for  his  own  particular 
place. 


CHAPTER  X 
THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 

THE  fundamental  failure  of  humanity  so  far  is  in  self-asser- 
tion. 

The  essential  distinctive  trait  of  modern  civilization  is 
machinery. 

Machinery  logically  and  irrevocably  involves  the  cooperative 
action  of  individuals. 

If  we  make  levers  and  iron  wheels  work  by  putting  them 
together  according  to  their  nature,  we  can  only  make  vast 
masses  of  men  work  by  putting  them  together  according  tc 
their  nature. 

So  far  we  have  been  trying  to  make  vast  masses  of  men  work 
together  in  precisely  the  same  way  we  make  levers  and  iron 
wheels  work  together.  We  have  thought  we  could  make  diabol- 
ically, foolishly,  insanely  inflexible  men-machines  which  violate 
at  every  point  the  natural  qualities  and  instincts  of  the  materials 
of  which  they  are  made. 

We  have  failed  to  assert  ourselves  against  our  iron  machines. 
We  have  let  our  iron  machines  assert  themselves  against  us. 
We  have  let  our  iron  machines  be  models  for  us.  We  have 
overlooked  the  difference  in  the  nature  of  the  materials  in 
machines  of  iron  and  machines  of  men. 

A  man  is  a  self-reproducing  machine,  and  an  iron  machine 
is  one  that  has  to  be  reproduced  by  somebody  else. 

In  a  man-machine  arrangements  must  be  made  so  that  each 
man  can  be  allowed  to  be  the  father  of  his  own  children  and  the 
author  of  his  own  acts. 

In  society  or  the  man-machine,  if  it  is  to  work,  men  are 

266 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS  267 

individuals.  Society  is  organically,  irrevocably  dependent 
upon  each  man,  and  upon  what  each  man  chooses  according 
to  his  own  nature  to  do  himself. 

The  result  is,  the  first  principle  of  success  in  constructing  and 
running  a  social  machine  is  to  ask  and  to  get  an  answer  out  of 
each  man  who  is,  as  we  look  him  over  and  take  him  up,  and 
propose  to  put  him  into  it,  "What  are  you  like.'*"  "What  are 
you  especially  for.?"  "What  do  you  want.?"  "How  can  you 
get  it.?" 

Our  success  in  getting  him  properly  into  our  machine  turns 
upon  a  loyal,  patient,  imperious  attention  on  our  part  to  what 
there  is  inside  him,  inside  the  particular  individual  man,  and 
how  we  can  get  him  to  let  us  know  what  is  inside,  get  him  to 
decide  voluntarily  to  let  us  have  it,  and  let  us  work  it  into  the 
common  end. 

In  this  amazing,  impromptu,  new,  and  hurried  machine 
civilization  which  we  have  been  piling  up  around  us  for  a 
hundred  years  we  have  made  machines  out  of  every- 
thing, and  our  one  consummate  and  glaring  failure  in  the 
machines  we  have  made  is  the  machine  we  have  made  out  of 
ourselves. 

Mineral  machines  are  made  by  putting  comparatively  dead, 
or  at  least  dead-looking,  matter  together;  vegetable  machines 
or  gardens,  are  made  by  studying  little  unconscious  seeds  that 
we  can  persuade  to  come  up  and  to  reproduce  themselves. 
Man-machines  are  produced  by  putting  up  possible  lives  before 
particular  individual  men,  and  letting  them  find  out  (and  finding 
out  for  ourselves,  too),  day  by  day,  into  which  life  they  will 
grow  up. 

Everything  in  a  social  machine,  if  it  is  a  machine  that  really 
works,  is  based  on  the  profound  and  special  study  of  individuals : 
upon  drawing  out  the  aptitudes  and  motives,  choices  and  genius 
in  each  man;  the  passion,  if  he  has  any;  the  creative  desire,  the 
self -expressing,  self -reproducing,  inner  manhood;  the  happy 
strength  there  is  in  him. 


268  CROWDS 

Trades  unions  overlook- this,  and  treat  all  men  alike  and  all 
employers  alike.     Employers  have  very  largely  overlooked  it. 

It  is  the  industrial,  social,  and  religious  secret  of  our  modern 
machine  civilization.  We  need  not  be  discouraged  about 
machines,  because  the  secret  of  the  machine  civilization  has 
as  yet  barely  been  noticed. 

The  elephants  are  running  around  in  the  garden.  But  they 
have  merely  taken  us  by  surprise.  It  is  their  first  and  their 
last  chance.  The  men  about  us  are  seeing  what  to  do.  We  are 
to  get  control  of  the  elephants,  first,  by  getting  control  of  our- 
selves. We  are  beginning  to  organize  our  people-machines  as  if 
they  were  made  of  people;  so  that  the  people  in  them  can  keep 
on  being  people,  and  being  better  ones.  And  as  our  people- 
machines  begin  to  become  machines  that  really  work,  our  iron 
machines  will  no  longer  be  feared.  They  will  reach  over  and 
help.  As  we  look  about  us  we  shall  see  our  iron  machines  at 
last,  about  all  the  world,  all  joining  in,  all  hard  at  work  for  uS; 
a  milHon,  million  machines  a  day  making  the  crowd  beautiful. 


CHAPTER  XI 
MACHINES,  CROWDS,  AND  ARTISTS 

A  CROWD  civilization  produces,  as  a  matter  of  course, 
crowd  art  and  art  for  crowded  conditions.  This  fact  is  at  once 
the  glory  and  the  weakness  of  the  kind  of  art  a  democracy  is 
bound  .to  have. 

The  most  natural  evidence  to  turn  to  first,  of  the  crowd 
in  a  crowd  age,  is  such  as  can  be  found  in  its  literature, 
especially  in  its  masterpieces. 

The  significance  of  shaking  hands  with  a  Senator  of  the 
United  States  is  that  it  is  a  convenient  and  labour-saving  way  of 
shaking  hands  with  two  or  three  million  people.  The  impressive- 
ness  of  the  Senator's  Washington  voice,  the  voice  on  the  floor 
of  the  Senate,  consists  in  the  mystical  undertone  —  the  chorus 
in  it  —  multitudes  in  smoking  cities,  men  and  women,  rich  and 
poor,  who  are  speaking  when  this  man  speaks,  and  who  are 
silent  when  he  is  silent,  in  the  government  of  the  United  States. 

The  typical  fact  that  the  Senator  stands  for  in  modern  life 
has  a  corresponding  typical  fact  in  modern  literature.  The 
typical  fact  in  modern  Uterature  is  the  epigram,  the  senatorial 
sentence,  the  sentence  that  immeasurably  represents  what  it 
does  not  say.  The  difference  between  democracy  in  Washing- 
ton and  democracy  in  Athens  may  be  said  to  be  that  in  W  ashing- 
ton  we  have  an  epigram  government,  a  government  in  which 
ninety  miUion  people  are  crowded  into  two  rooms  to  consider 
what  to  do,  and  in  which  ninety  million  people  are  made  to 
sit  in  one  chair  to  see  that  it  is  done.  In  Athens  every  man 
represented  himself. 

It  may  be  said  to  be  a  good  working  distinction  between 

269 


270  CROWDS 

modern  and  classic  art  that  in  modern  art  words  and  colours 
and  sounds  stand  for  things,  and  in  classic  art  they  said  them. 
In  the  art  of  the  Greek,  things  were  what  they  seemed,  and  they 
were  all  there.  Hence  simplicity.  It  is  a  quality  of  the  art  of 
to-day  that  things  are  not  what  they  seem  in  it.  If  they  were, 
we  should  not  call  it  art  at  all.  Everything  stands  not  only 
for  itself  and  for  what  it  says,  but  for  an  immeasurable 
something  that  cannot  be  said.  Every  sound  in  music  is  the 
senator  of  a  thousand  sounds,  thoughts,  and  associations,  and 
in  literature  every  word  that  is  allowed  to  appear  is  the 
representative  in  three  syllables  of  three  pages  of  a  dictionary. 
The  whistle  of  the  locomotive,  and  the  ring  of  the  telephone, 
and  the  still,  swift  rush  of  the  elevator  are  making  themselves 
felt  in  the  ideal  world.  They  are  proclaiming  to  the  ideal 
world  that  the  real  world  is  outstripping  it.  The  twelve 
thousand  horsepower  steamer  does  not  find  itself  accurately 
expressed  in  iambics  on  the  leisurely  fleet  of  Ulysses.  It  is  seek- 
ing new  expression.  The  command  has  gone  forth  over  all 
the  beauty  and  over  all  the  art  of  the  present  world,  crowded 
for  time  and  crowded  for  space.  "Telegraph!"  To  the  nine 
Muses  the  order  flies.  One  can  hear  it  on  every  side.  "Tele- 
graph!" The  result  is  symbolism,  the  Morse  alphabet  of 
art  and  "types,"  the  epigrams  of  human  nature,  crowding 
us  all  into  ten  or  twelve  people.  The  epic  is  telescoped  into 
the  sonnet,  and  the  sonnet  is  compressed  into  quatrains  or 
Tabbs  of  poetry,  and  couplets  are  signed  as  masterpieces. 
The  novel  has  come  into  being  —  several  hundred  pages  of 
crowded  people  in  crowded  sentences,  jostling  each  other  to 
oblivion;  and  now  the  novel,  jostled  into  oblivion  by  the  next 
novel,  is  becoming  the  short  story.  Kipling's  short  stories  sum 
the  situation  up.  So  far  as  skeleton  or  plot  is  concerned,  they 
are  built  up  out  of  a  bit  of  nothing  put  with  an  infinity  of  Kip- 
ling; so  far  as  meat  is  concerned,  they  are  the  Liebig  Beef  Ex- 
tract of  fiction.  A  single  jar  of  Kipling  contains  a  whole  herd 
of  old-time  novels  lowing  on  a  hundred  hills. 


MACHINES,  CROWDS,  AND  ARTISTS  ^271 

The  classic  of  any  given  world  is  a  work  of  art  that  has  passed 
through  the  same  process  in  being  a  work  of  art  that  that  world 
has  passed  through  in  being  a  world.  Mr.  Kipling  represents 
a  crowd  age,  because  he  is  crowded  with  it;  because,  above  all 
others,  he  is  the  man  who  produces  art  in  the  way  the  age  he 
lives  in  is  producing  everything  else. 

This  is  no  mere  circumstance  of  democracy.  It  is  its  manifest 
destiny  that  it  shall  produce  art  for  crowded  conditions,  that  it 
shall  have  crowd  art.  The  kind  of  beauty  that  can  be  indefi- 
nitely multiplied  is  the  kind  of  beauty  in  which,  in  the  nature  of 
things,  we  have  made  our  most  characteristic  and  most  impor- 
tant progress.  Our  most  considerable  success  in  pictures  could 
not  be  otherwise  than  in  black  and  white.  Black-and-white 
art  is  printing-press  art;  and  art  that  can  be  produced  in  endless 
copies,  that  can  be  subscribed  for  by  crowds,  finds  an  extra- 
ordinary demand,  and  artists  have  applied  themselves  to 
supplying  it.  All  the  improvements,  moving  on  through 
the  use  of  wood  and  steel  and  copper,  and  the  process  of  etching, 
to.  the  photogravure,  the  lithograph,  the  moving  picture,  and 
the  latest  photograph  in  colour,  whatever  else  may  be  said 
of  them  from  the  point  of  view  of  Titian  or  Michael  Angelo, 
constitute  a  most  amazing  and  triumphant  advance  from  the 
point  of  view  of  making  art  a  democracy,  of  making  the  rare  and 
the  beautiful  minister  day  and  night  to  crowds.  The  fact  that 
the  mechanical  arts  are  so  prominent  in  their  relation  to  the  fine 
arts  may  not  seem  to  argue  a  high  ideal  amongst  us;  but  as  the 
mechanical  arts  are  the  body  of  beauty,  and  the  fine  arts  are  the 
soul  of  it,  it  is  a  necessary  part  of  the  ideal  to  keep  body  and 
soul  together  until  we  can  do  better.  Mourning  with  Ruskin 
is  not  so  much  to  the  point  as  going  to  work  with  William 
Morris.  If  we  have  deeper  feelings  about  wall-papers  than  we 
have  about  other  things,  it  is  going  to  the  root  of  the  matter 
to  begin  with  wall-papers,  to  make  machinery  say  something  as 
beautiful  as  possible,  inasmuch  as  it  is  bound  to  have,  for  a 
long  time  at  least,  about  all  the  say  there  is.     The  photograph 


272  CROWDS 

does  not  go  about  the  world  doing  Murillos  everywhere  by 
pressing  a  button,  but  the  camera  habit  is  doing  more  in  the 
way  of  steady  daily  hydraulic  lifting  of  great  masses  of  men  to 
where  they  enjoy  beauty  in  the  world  than  Leonardo  da  Vinci 
would  have  dared  to  dream  in  his  far-off  day;  and  Leonardo's 
pictures,  thanks  to  the  same  photograph,  and  everybody's 
pictures,  films  of  paper,  countless  spirits  of  themselves,  pass 
around  the  world  to  every  home  in  Christendom.  The  printing 
press  made  literature  a  democracy,  and  machinery  is  making  all 
the  arts  democracies.  The  symphony  piano,  an  invention  for 
making  vast  numbers  of  people  who  can  play  only  a  few  very 
poor  things  play  very  poorly  a  great  many  good  ones,  is  a  con- 
summate instance  both  of  the  limitation  and  the  value  of  our 
contemporary  tendency  in  the  arts.  The  pipe  organ,  though 
on  a  much  higher  plane,  is  an  equally  characteristic  contrivance 
making  it  possible  for  a  man  to  be  a  complete  orchestra  and  a 
conductor  all  by  himself,  playing  on  a  crowd  of  instruments,  to 
a  crowd  of  people,  with  two  hands  and  one  pair  of  feet.  It  is  a 
crowd  invention.  The  orchestra  —  a  most  distinctively  mod- 
ern institution,  a  kind  of  republic  of  sound,  the  unseen  spirit 
of  the  many  in  one  —  is  the  sublimest  expression  yet  attained 
of  the  crowd  music,  which  is,  and  must  be,  the  supreme  music 
of  this  modern  day,  the  symphony.  Richard  Wagner  comes  to 
his  triumph  because  his  music  is  the  voice  of  multitudes.  The 
opera,  a  crowd  of  sounds  accompanied  by  a  crowd  of  sights, 
presented  by  one  crowd  of  people  on  the  stage  to  another  crowd 
of  people  in  the  galleries,  stands  for  the  same  tendency  in  art 
that  the  syndicate  stands  for  in  commerce.  It  is  syndicate 
music;  and  in  proportion  as  a  musical  composition  in  this  present 
day  is  an  aggregation  of  multitudinous  moods,  in  proportion 
as  it  is  suggestive,  complex,  paradoxical,  the  way  a  crowd 
is  complex,  suggestive,  and  paradoxical  —  provided  it  be 
wrought  at  the  same  time  into  some  vast  and  splendid  unity  — 
just  in  this  proportion  is  it  modern  music.  It  gives  itself  to 
the  counterpoints  of  the  spirit,  the  passion  of  variety  in  modern 


MACHINES,  CROWDS,  AND  ARTISTS  273 

life.  The  legacy  of  all  the  ages,  is  it  not  descended  upon  us? 
—  the  spirit  of  a  thousand  nations?  All  our  arts  are  thousand- 
nation  arts,  shadows  and  echoes  of  dead  worlds  playing  upon 
our  own.  Italian  music,  out  of  its  feudal  kingdoms,  comes  to 
us  as  essentially  solo  music  —  melody;  and  the  civilization  of 
Greece,  being  a  civilization  of  heroes,  individuals,  comes  to  us 
in  its  noble  array  with  its  solo  arts,  its  striding  heroes  every- 
where in  front  of  all,  and  with  nothing  nearer  to  the  people  in  it 
than  the  Greek  Chorus,  which,  out  of  limbo,  pale  and  featureless 
across  all  ages,  sounds  to  us  as  the  first  far  faint  coming  of  the 
crowd  to  the  arts  of  this  groping  world.  Modern  art,  inheriting 
each  of  these  and  each  of  all  things,  is  revealed  to  us  as  the 
struggle  to  express  all  things  at  once.  Democracy  is  democracy 
for  this  very  reason,  and  for  no  other :  that  all  things  may  be  ex- 
pressed at  once  in  it,  and  that  all  things  may  be  given  a  chance  to 
be  expressed  at  once  in  it.  Being  a  race  of  hero-worshippers,  the 
Greeks  said  the  best,  perhaps,  what  could  be  said  in  sculpture; 
but  the  marbles  and  bronzes  of  a  democracy,  having  average 
men  for  subjects,  and  being  done  by  average  men,  are  aver- 
age marbles  and  bronzes.  We  express  what  we  have.  We  are 
in  a  transition  stage.  It  is  not  without  its  significance,  however, 
that  we  have  perfected  the  plaster  cast  —  the  establishment 
of  democracy  among  statues,  and  mobs  of  Greek  gods  min- 
gling with  the  people  can  be  seen  almost  any  day  in  every  con- 
siderable city  of  the  world.  The  same  priniciple  is  working 
itself  out  in  our  architecture.  It  is  idle  to  contend  against 
the  principle.  The  way  out  is  the  way  through.  However 
eagerly  we  gaze  at  Parthenons  on  their  ruined  hills,  if 
thirty-one-story  blocks  are  in  our  souls  thirty-one-story 
blocks  will  be  our  masterpieces,  whether  we  like  it  or  not.  They 
will  be  our  masterpieces  because  they  tell  the  truth  about  us; 
and  while  truth  may  not  be  beautiful,  it  is  the  thing  that  must 
be  told  first  before  beauty  can  begin.  The  beauty  we  are  to 
have  shall  only  be  worked  out  from  the  truth  we  have.  Living 
as  we  do  in  a  new  era,  not  to  see  that  the  thirty-one-story 


274  CROWDS 

block  is  the  expression  of  a  new  truth  is  to  turn  ourselves  away 
from  the  one  way  that  beauty  can  ever  be  found  by  men,  in  this 
era  or  in  any  other. 

What  is  it  that  the  thirty-one-story  block  is  trying  to  say 
about  us?  The  thirty-one-story  block  is  the  masterpiece  of 
mass,  of  immensity,  of  numbers;  with  its  2427  windows  and  its 
779  offices,  and  its  crowds  of  lives  piled  upon  lives,  it  is  express- 
ing the  one  supreme  and  characteristic  thing  that  is  taking 
place  in  the  era  in  which  we  live.  The  city  is  the  main  fact 
that  modern  civilization  stands  for,  and  crowding  is  the  logical 
architectural  form  of  the  city  idea.  The  thirty-one-story 
block  is  the  statue  of  a  crowd.  It  stands  for  a  spiritual  fact, 
and  it  will  never  be  beautiful  until  that  fact  is  beautiful.  The 
only  way  to  make  the  thirty-one-story  block  beautiful  (the 
crowd  expressed  by  the  crowd)  is  to  make  the  crowd  beautiful. 
The  most  artistic,  the  only  artistic,  thing  the  world  can  do  next 
is  to  make  the  crowd  beautiful. 

The  typical  city  blocks,  with  their  garrets  in  the  lower  stories 
of  the  sky,  were  not  possible  in  the  ancient  world,  because  steel 
had  not  been  invented;  and  the  invention  of  steel,  which  is  not 
the  least  of  our  triumphs  in  the  mechanical  arts,  is  in  many 
ways  the  most  characteristic.  Steel  is  republican  for  stone. 
Putting  whole  quarries  into  a  single  girder,  it  makes  room  for 
crowds;  and  what  is  more  significant  than  this,  inasmuch  as  the 
steel  pillar  is  an  invention  that  makes  it  possible  to  put  floors 
up  first,  and  build  the  walls  around  the  floors,  instead  of  putting 
the  walls  up  first  and  supporting  the  floors  upon  the  walls,  as 
in  the  ancient  world,  it  has  come  to  pass  that  the  modern  world 
being  the  ancient  world  turned  upside  down,  modern  architec- 
ture is  ancient  architecture  turned  inside  out,  a  symbol  of  many 
things.  The  ancient  world  was  a  wall  of  individuals,  supporting 
floor  after  floor  and  stage  after  stage  of  society,  from  the  lowest 
to  the  highest;  and  it  is  a  typical  fact  in  this  modern  demo- 
cratic world  that  it  grows  from  the  inside,  and  that  it  supports 
itself  from  the  inside.     When  the  mass  in  the  centre  has  been 


MACHINES,  CROWDS,  AND  ARTISTS  275 

finished,  an  ornamental  stone  facing  of  great  individuals  will 
be  built  around  it  and  supported  by  it,  and  the  work  will  be 
considered  done. 

The  modern  spirit  has  much  to  boast  of  in  its  mechanical  arts, 
and  in  its  fine  arts  almost  nothing,  because  the  mechanical  arts 
are  studying  what  men  are  needing  to-day,  and  the  fine  arts 
are  studying  what  the  Greeks  needed  three  thousand  years  ago. 
To  be  a  real  classic  is,  first,  to  be  a  contemporary  of  one's  own 
time;  second,  to  be  a  contemporary  of  one's  own  time  so  deeply 
and  widely  as  to  be  a  contemporary  of  all  time.  The  true 
Greek  is  a  man  who  is  doing  with  his  own  age  what  the  Greeks 
did  with  theirs,  bringing  all  ages  to  bear  upon  it,  and  interpreting 
it.  As  long  as  the  fine  arts  miss  the  fundamental  principle  of 
this  present  age  —  the  crowd  principle,  and  the  mechanical 
arts  do  not,  the  mechanical  arts  are  bound  to  have  their  way 
wdth  us.  And  it  were  vastly  better  that  they  should.  Sincere 
and  straightforward  mechanical  arts  are  not  only  more  beautiful 
than  affected  fine  ones,  but  they  are  more  to  the  point :  they  are 
the  one  sure  sign  we  have  of  where  we  are  going  to  be  beautiful 
next.  It  is  impossible  to  love  the  fine  arts  in  the  year  1913 
without  studying  the  mechanical  ones;  without  finding  one's  self 
looking  for  artistic  material  in  the  things  that  people  are  using, 
and  that  they  are  obliged  to  use.  The  determining  law  of  a 
thing  of  beauty  being,  in  the  nature  of  things,  what  it  is  for,  the 
very  essence  of  the  classic  attitude  in  a  utilitarian  age  is  to  make 
the  beautiful  follow  the  useful  and  inspire  the  useful  with  its 
spirit.  The  fine  art  of  the  next  thousand  years  shall  be  the 
transfiguring  of  the  mechanical  arts.  The  modern  hotel,  having 
been  made  necessary  by  great  natural  forces  in  modern  life,  and 
having  been  made  possible  by  new  mechanical  arts,  now  puts 
itself  forward  as  the  next  great  opportunity  of  the  fine  arts. 
One  of  the  characteristic  achievements  of  the  immediate  future 
shall  be  the  twentieth-century  Parthenon  —  a  Parthenon  not 
of  the  great  and  of  the  few  and  of  the  gods,  but  of  the  great 
many,  where,  through  mighty  corridors,  day  and  night,  democ- 


276  CROWDS 

racy  wanders  and  sleeps  and  chatters  and  is  sad  and  lives  and 
dies,  streets  rumbling  below.  The  hotel  —  the  crowd  fireside 
—  being  more  than  any  other  one  thing,  perhaps,  the  thing  that 
this  civilization  is  about,  the  token  of  what  it  loves  and  of  how  it 
lives,  is  bound  to  be  a  masterpiece  sooner  or  later  that  shall 
express  democracy.  The  hotel  rotunda,  the  parlour  for  multi- 
tudes, is  bound  to  be  made  beautiful  in  ways  we  do  not  guess. 
Why  should  we  guess?  Multitudes  have  never  wanted  par- 
lours before.  The  idea  of  a  parlour  has  been  to  get  out  of  a 
multitude.  All  the  inevitable  problems  that  come  of  having 
a  whole  city  of  families  live  in  one  house  have  yet  to  be  solved 
by  the  fine  arts  as  well  as  by  the  mechanical  ones.  We  have 
barely  begun.  The  time  is  bound  to  come  when  the  radiator, 
the  crowd's  fireplace-in-a-pipe,  shall  be  made  beautiful;  and 
when  the  electric  light  shall  be  taught  the  secret  of  the  candle; 
and  when  the  especial  problem  of  modern  life  —  of  how  to  make 
two  rooms  as  good  as  twelve  —  shall  be  mastered  aesthetically 
as  well  as  mathematically;  and  when  even  the  piano-folding- 
bed-bookcase-toilet-stand-writing-desk  —  a  crowd  invention  for 
living  in  a  crowd  —  shall  either  take  beauty  to  itself  or  lead 
to  beauty  that  serves  the  same  end. 

While  for  the  time  being  it  seems  to  be  true  that  the  fine  arts 
are  looking  to  the  past,  the  mechanical  arts  are  producing  con- 
ditions in  the  future  that  will  bring  the  fine  arts  to  terms, 
whether  they  want  to  be  brought  to  terms  or  not.  The  mechani- 
cal arts  hold  the  situation  in  their  hands.  It  is  decreed  that 
people  who  cannot  begin  by  making  the  things  they  use  beautiful 
shall  be  allowed  no  beauty  in  other  things.  We  may  wish  that 
Parthenons  and  cathedrals  were  within  our  souls;  but  what  the 
cathedral  said  of  an  age  that  had  the  cathedral  mood,  that  had 
a  cathedral  civilization  and  thrones  and  popes  in  it,  we  are 
bound  to  say  in  some  stupendous  fashion  of  our  own  —  some- 
thing which,  when  it  is  built  at  last,  will  be  left  worshipping 
upon  the  ground  beneath  the  sky  when  we  are  dead,  as  a  me- 
morial that  we  too  have  lived.     The  great  cathedrals,  with  the 


MACHINES,  CROWDS,  AND  ARTISTS  277 

feet  of  the  huddled  and  dreary  poor  upon  their  floors,  and  saints 
and  heroes  shining  on  their  pillars,  and  priests  behind  the 
chancel  with  God  to  themselves,  and  the  vast  and  vacant  nave, 
symbol  of  the  heaven  glimmering  above  that  few  could  reach  ■ — 
it  is  not  to  these  that  we  shall  look  to  get  ourselves  said  to  the 
nations  that  are  now  unborn; rather,  though  it  be  strange  to  sav 
it,  we  shall  look  to  something  like  the  ocean  steamship  — 
cathedral  of  this  huge  unresting  modern  world  —  under  the 
wide  heaven,  on  the  infinite  seas,  with  spars  for  towers  and  the 
empty  nave  reversed  filled  with  human  beings'  souls  —  the 
cathedral  of  crowds  hurrying  to  crowds.  There  are  hundreds 
of  them  throbbing  and  gleaming  in  the  night  —  this  very  mo- 
ment —  lonely  cities  in  the  hollow  of  the  stars,  bringing  together 
the  nations  of  the  earth. 

When  the  spirit  of  our  modem  way  of  living,  the  idea  in  it, 
the  bare  facts  about  our  modem  human  nature  have  been 
noticed  at  last  by  our  modern  artists,  masterpieces  shall  come 
to  us  out  of  every  great  and  living  activity  in  our  lives. 
Art  shall  tell  the  things  these  lives  are  about.  When  this 
is  once  realized  in  America  as  it  was  in  Greece,  the  fine  arts 
shall  cover  the  other  arts  as  the  waters  cover  the  sea.  The 
Brooklyn  Bridge,  swinging  its  web  for  immortal  souls  across 
sky  and  sea,  comes  nearer  to  being  a  work  of  art  than  almost 
anything  we  possess  to-day,  because  it  tells  the  truth,  because 
it  is  the  material  form  of  a  spiritual  idea,  because  it  is  a 
sublime  and  beautiful  expression  of  New  York  in  the  way 
that  the  Acropolis  was  a  sublime  and  beautiful  expression 
of  Athens.  The  Acropolis  was  beautiful  because  it  was  the 
abode  of  heroes,  of  great  individuals;  and  the  Brooklyn  Bridge, 
because  it  expresses  the  bringing  together  of  millions  of  men. 
It  is  the  architecture  of  crowds  —  this  Brooklyn  Bridge  — 
with  winds  and  sunsets  and  the  dark  and  the  tides  of  souls 
upon  it;  it  is  the  type  and  symbol  of  the  kind  of  thing  that  our 
modern  genius  is  bound  to  make  beautiful  and  immortal  before 
it  dies.     The  very  word  "bridge"  is  the  symbol  of  the  future  of 


278  CROWDS 

art  and  of  everything  else,  the  bringing  together  of  things  that 
are  apart  —  democracy.  The  bridge,  which  makes  land  across 
the  water,  and  the  boat,  which  makes  land  on  the  water,  and 
the  cable,  which  makes  land  and  water  alike  —  these  are  the 
physical  forms  of  the  spirit  of  modern  life,  the  democracy  of 
matter.  But  the  spirit  has  comitless  forms.  They  are  all  new 
and  they  are  all  waiting  to  be  made  beautiful.  The  dumb 
crowd  waits  in  them.  We  have  electricity  —  the  life  current 
of  the  republican  idea  —  characteristically  our  foremost 
invention,  because  it  takes  all  power  that  belongs  to  individual 
places  and  puts  it  on  a  wire  and  carries  it  to  all  places.  We 
have  the  telephone,  an  invention  which  makes  it  possible  for 
a  man  to  live  on  a  back  street  and  be  a  next-door  neighbour  to 
boulevards;  and  we  have  the  trolley,  the  modern  reduction  of 
the  private  carriage  to  its  lowest  terms,  so  that  any  man  for  five 
cents  can  have  as  much  carriage  power  as  Napckon  with  all  his 
chariots.  We  have  the  phonograph,  an  invention  which  gives 
a  man  a  thousand  voices;  which  sets  him  to  singing  a  thousand 
songs  at  the  same  time  to  a  thousand  crowds;  which  makes  it 
possible  for  the  commonest  man  to  hear  the  whisper  of  Bismarck 
or  Gladstone,  to  unwind  crowds  of  great  men  by  the  firelight 
of  his  own  house.  We  have  the  elevator,  an  invention  for  mak- 
ing the  many  as  well  off  as  the  few,  an  approximate  arrange- 
ment for  giving  first  floors  to  everybody,  and  putting  all  men 
on  a  level  at  the  same  price  —  one  more  of  a  thousand  instances 
of  the  extraordinary  manner  in  which  the  mechanical  arts  have 
devoted  themselves  from  first  to  last  to  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States.  While  it  cannot  be  said  of  many  of  these  tools 
of  existence  that  they  are  beautiful  now,  it  is  enough  to  affirm 
that  when  they  are  perfected  they  will  be  beautiful;  and  that 
if  we  cannot  make  beautiful  the  things  that  we  need,  we  cannot 
expect  to  make  beautiful  the  things  that  we  merely  want. 
When  the  beauty  of  these  things  is  at  last  brought  out,  we  shall 
have  attained  the  most  characteristic  and  original  and  expressive 
and  beautiful  art  that  is  in  our  power.     It  will  be  unprecedented 


MACHINES,  CROWDS,  AND  ARTISTS  279 

because  it  will  tell  unprecedented  truths.  It  was  the  mission  of 
ancient  art  to  express  states  of  being  and  individuals,  and  it 
may  be  said  to  be  in  a  general  way  the  mission  of  our  modem 
art  to  express  the  beautiful  in  endless  change,  the  movement 
of  masses,  coming  to  its  sublimity  and  immortality  at  last  by 
revealing  the  beauty  of  the  things  that  move  and  that  have  to  do 
with  motion,  the  bringing  of  all  things  and  of  all  souls  together 
on  the  earth. 

The  fulfillment  of  the  word  that  has  been  written,  "Your, 
valleys  shall  be  exalted,  and  your  mountains  shall  be  made  low," 
is  by  no  means  a  beautiful  process.  Democracy  is  the  grading 
principle  of  the  beautiful.  The  natural  tendency  the  arts  have 
had  from  the  first  to  rise  from  the  level  of  the  world,  to  make 
themselves  into  Switzerlands  in  it,  is  finding  itself  confronted 
with  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  —  a  Constitution 
which,  whatever  it  may  be  said  to  mean  in  the  years  to  come, 
has  placed  itself  on  record  up  to  the  present  time,  at  least,  as 
standing  for  the  tableland. 

The  very  least  that  can  be  granted  to  this  Constitution  is 
that  it  is  so  consummate  a  political  document  that  it  has  made 
itself  the  creed  of  our  theology,  philosophy,  and  sociology;  the 
principle  of  our  commerce  and  industry;  the  law  of  production, 
education,  and  journalism;  the  method  of  our  life;  the  con- 
trolhng  characteristic  and  the  significant  force  in  our  literature; 
and  the  thing  our  rehgion  and  our  arts  are  about. 


PART  THREE 
PEOPLE-MACHINES 
.  CHAPTER  I 
NOW! 

THIS  outlook  or  glimmer  of  vision  I  have  tried  to  trace, 
for  the  art  of  crowds  is  something  we  want,  and  want  daily, 
in  the  future.  We  want  daily  a  future.  But,  after  all,  it 
is  a  future. 

I  speak  in  this  present  chapter  as  one  of  the  crowd  who 
wants  something  now. 

I  find  myself  in  a  world  in  which  apparently  some  vast 
anonymous  arrangement  was  made  about  me  and  about 
my  life,  before  I  was  born.  This  arrangement  seems  to  be, 
as  I  understand  it,  that  if  I  want  to  live  while  I  am  on  this 
planet  a  certain  sort  of  life  or  be  a  certain  sort  of  person, 
I  am  expected  practically  to  take  out  a  permit  for  it  from 
the  proper  authorities. 

In  the  previous  chapter  I  made  a  request  of  the  authorities, 
as  perhaps  the  reader  will  remember.  I  said,  'I  want  to 
be  good  now." 

In  this  one  I  have  a  further  request  to  make  of  the  authori- 
ties: "I  want  to  be  beautiful." 

I  want  to  be  beautiful  now. 

I  find  thousands  of  other  people  about  me  on  every  hand 
making  these  same  two  requests.  I  find  that  the  authorities 
do  not  seem  to  notice  their  requests  any  more  than  they  have 
noticed  mine. 

280 


NOW!  281 

Some  of  us  have  begun  to  suspect  that  we  must  have  made 
the  request  in  the  wrong  way.  Perhaps  we  should  not  ask 
a  world  —  a  great,  vague  thing  like  the  world  in  general  — 
to  make  any  slight  arrangement  we  may  need  for  being  beau- 
tiful. We  have  come  to  feel  that  we  must  ask  somebody 
in  particular,  and  do  something  in  particular,  and  find  some 
one  in  particular  with  whom  we  can  do  it.  There  is  getting 
to  be  but  one  course  open  to  a  man  if  he  wants  to  be  beau- 
tiful. He  must  bone  down  and  work  hard  with  his  soul,  make 
himself  see  precisely  what  it  is  and  who  it  is  standing  between 
him  and  a  beautiful  world.  He  must  ask  particular  persons 
in  particular  positions  if  they  do  not  think  he  ought  to  be 
allowed  to  be  beautiful.  He  must  ask  some  millionaire  prob- 
ably first  —  his  employer,  for  instance  —  to  stop  getting  in 
his  way,  and  at  least  to  step  one  side  and  let  him  reason  with 
him.  And  when  he  cannot  ask  his  millionaire  —  his  own 
particular  humdrum  millionaire  —  to  step  one  side  and  reason 
with  him,  he  must  ask  iron-inachines  to  step  one  side  and 
reason  with  him.  After  this  he  must  ask  crowds  to  please 
to  step  one  side  and  reason  with  him. 

Whatever  happens,  he  is  sure  to  find  always  these  same 
three  great,  imponderable  obstructions  in  the  way  of  his 
being  beautiful — the  humdrum  millionaires,  the  iron-machines, 
and  crowds. 

In  the  old  days  when  any  one  wanted  to  be  beautiful  he 
found  it  more  convenient.  There  was  very  likely  some  one 
who  was  more  beautiful  than  he  was  nearby,  some  one  who 
found  him  craving  the  same  thing  that  he  had  craved,  and 
who  recognized  it  and  delighted  in  it,  and  who  could  make 
room  and  help. 

Nowadays,  if  one  wants  to  be  beautiful  one  must  ask  every- 
body. Every  man  finds  it  the  same.  He  must  ask  mil- 
lions of  people  to  let  him  be  something,  one  after  the  other 
in  rows,  that  they  do  not  want  him  to  be  or  do  not  care  whether 
he  is  or  not.     He  has  to  ask  more  people  than  he  could  count. 


282  CROWDS 

before  he  dies,  to  let  him  be  beautiful.     Many  of  them  that 
he  has  to  ask,  sometimes  most  of  them,  are  his  inferiors. 

I  have  tried  to  deal  with  how  it  is  going  to  be  possible  for 
a  man  to  break  through  to  being  beautiful,  past  millionaires 
and  past  iron-machines.  I  would  like  now  to  deal  with  the 
people-machines  or  crowds,  and  how  perhaps  to  break  past 
them  and  be  beautiful  in  behalf  of  them,  in  spite  of  them. 


CHAPTER  II 

COMMITTEES  AND  COMMITTEES 

THE  problem  seems  to  be  something  like  this.  One  finds 
one  has  been  born  and  put  here  whether  or  no,  and  that  one 
is  inextricably  alive  in  a  state  of  society  in  which  men  are 
coming  to  live  in  a  kind  of  vast  disease  of  being  obliged  to 
do  everything  together. 

We  are  still  old-fashioned  enough  to  be  born  one  at  a  time, 
but  we  are  educated  in  litters  and  we  do  our  work  in  the  world 
in  herds  and  gangs.  Even  the  upper  classes  do  their  work 
in  gangs,  and  with  overseers  and  little  crowds  called  com- 
mittees. Our  latest  idea  consists  in  putting  parts  of  a  great 
many  different  men  together  to  make  one  great  one — form- 
ing a  committee  to  make  a  man  of  genius. 

There  is  no  denying  that,  in  a  way,  a  committee  does  things; 
but  what  becomes  of  the  committee? 

And  the  lower  in  the  scale  of  life  we  go  the  more  commit- 
tees it  takes  to  do  the  work  of  one  man  and  the  more  im- 
possible it  becomes  to  find  anything  but  parts  of  men  to  do 
things.  I  put  it  frankly  to  the  reader.  The  chances  are 
nine  out  of  ten  that  when  you  meet  a  man  nowadays  and 
look  at  him  hard  or  try  to  do  something  with  him  you  find 
he  is  not  a  man  at  all  but  is  some  subsection  of  a  committee. 
You  cannot  even  talk  with  such  a  man  without  selecting 
some  subsection  of  some  subject  which  interests  him;  and 
if  you  select  any  other  subsection  than  his  subsection  he  will 
think  you  a  bore;  and  if  you  select  his  subsection  he  will  think 
that  you  do  not  know  anything. 

A.nd  if  you  want  to  get  anything  done  that  is  different, 

283 


284  CROWDS 

or  that  is  the  least  bit  interesting,  and  want  to  get  some  one 
to  do  it,  how  will  you  go  about  it?  You  will  find  yourself 
being  sent  from  one  person  to  another;  and  before  you  know 
it  you  find  yourself  mixed  up  with  nine  or  ten  subdivisions 
of  nine  or  ten  committees;  and  after  you  have  got  your  nine 
or  ten  subsections  of  nine  or  ten  committees  to  get  together 
to  consider  what  it  is  you  want  done,  they. will  tell  you,  after 
due  deliberation,  that  it  is  not  worth  doing,  or  that  you  had 
better  do  it  yourself.  Then  every  subsection  of  every  com- 
mittee will  go  home  muttering  under  its  breath  to  every  other 
subsection  that  a  man  who  wants  slightly  different  and  in- 
teresting things  done  in  society  is  a  public  nuisance;  and 
that  the  man  who  does  not  know  what  subsection  he  is 
in  and  what  subsection  of  a  man  he  was  intended  to 
be,  and  who  tries  to  do  things,  carries  dismay  and 
anger  on  every  side  around  him.  Drop  into  your  pigeon- 
hole and  be  filed  away,  O  Gentle  Reader!  Do  you  think 
you  are  a  soul?  No;  you  are  Series  B.  No.  2574,  top  row  on 
the  left. 

In  my  morning  paper  the  other  day  I  read  that  in  a  factory 
whose  long  windows  I  often  pass  in  the  train,  they  have  their 
machinery  so  perfected  that  it  takes  sixty-four  machines  to 
make  one  shoe. 

Query — If  it  takes  sixty-four  machines  run  by  sixty-four 
men  who  do  nothing  else  to  make  one  shoe,  how  many 
machines  would  it  take,  and  how  many  shoes,  to  make  one 
man? 

Query — And  when  an  employer  in  a  shoe  factory  deals 
with  his  employee,  can  it  really  be  said,  after  all,  that  he  is 
dealing  with  him?  He  is  dealing  with  It — with  Nine  Hours 
a  Day,  of  one  sixty-fourth  of  a  man. 

The  natural  eflPect  of  crowds  and  of  machines  is  to 
make  a  man  feel  that  he  is,  and  always  was,  and 
always  will  be,  immemorially,  unanimously,  innumerably 
nobody. 


COMMITTEES  AND  COMMITTEES  285 

Sometimes  we  are  allowed  a  little  faint  nmneral  to  dangle 
up  over  our  oblivion.  Not  long  ago  I  saw  a  notice  or  letter 
in  the  West  Bulletin — ^probably  from  a  member  of  something 
— ending  Uke  this:  "...  I  hope  the  readers  of  the  Bulletin 
will  ponder  over  this  suggestion  of  Number  29,619. — Sincerely 
yaurs,  No.  11,  175." 


CHAPTER  III 
THE  INCONVENIENCE  OF  BEING  HUMAN 

I  SHALL  never  forget  one  day  I  spent  in  New  York  some 
years  ago — more  years  than  I  thought  at  first.  It  was  a  wrong- 
headed  day,  but  I  cannot  help  remembering  it  as  a  symbol 
of  a  dread  I  still  feel  at  times  in  New  York — a  feeling  of  being 
suddenly  lifted,  of  being  swept  out  under  (it  is  like  the  un- 
dertow of  the  sea)  into  a  kind  of  vast  deep  of  impersonality 
— swept  out  of  myself  into  a  wide,  imperious  waste  or  empti- 
ness of  people.  I  had  come  fresh  from  my  still  country 
meadow  and  mountain,  my  own  trees  and  my  own  bobo- 
links and  my  own  little  island  of  sky  up  over  me,  and  in  the 
vast  and  desolate  solitude  of  men  and  women  I  wandered 
about  up  and  down  the  streets.,  Every  block  I  saw,  every 
window,  skyline,  engine,  street-car,  every  human  face,  made 
me  feel  as  if  I  belonged  to  another  world.  Here  was  a  great 
conspiracy  in  stone  and  iron  against  my  own  life  with  myself. 
Was  there  a  soul  in  all  this  huge  roar  and  spectacle  of  glass 
and  stone  and  passion  that  cared  for  the  things  that  I  cared 
for,  or  the  things  that  I  loved,  or  that  would  care  one  shuffle 
of  all  the  feet  upon  the  stones  for  any  thought  or  word  or 
desire  of  mine.''  The  rain  swept  in  my  face,  and  I  spent  the 
day  walking  up  and  down  the  streets  looking  at  stones  and 
glass  and  people.  "Here  we  are!"  say  the  great  buildings 
crowding  on  the  sky.  "Who  are  you?"  ....  all  the 
stone  and  the  glass  and  the  walls,  the  mighty  syndicate  of 
matter  everywhere,  surrounded  me  —  one  little,  shivering, 
foolish  mote  of  being  fighting  foolishly  for  its  own  little  fool- 
ish mote  of  identity ! 

286 


THE  INCONVENIENCE  OF  BEING  HUMAN    287 

And  I  do  not  believe  that  I  was  all  wrong.  New  York, 
like  some  vast,  implacable  cone  of  ether,  some  merciless  an- 
aesthetic, was  thrust  down  over  me  and  my  breathing,  and 
I  still  had  a  kind  of  left-over  prejudice  that  I  wanted  to  be 
myself,  with  my  own  private  self-respect,  with  my  own  pri- 
vate, temporarily  finished-off,  provisionally  complete  per" 
sonality.  I  felt  then,  and  I  still  feel  to-day,  that  every  man, 
as  he  fights  for  his  breath,  must  stand  out  at  least  part  of 
his  time  for  the  right  of  being  self-contained.  It  is,  and  al- 
ways will  be,  one  of  the  appalling  sights  of  New  York  to  me — 
the  spectacle  of  the  helplessness,  the  wistfulness,  of  all  those 
poor  New  York  people  without  one  another.  Sometimes 
the  city  seems  to  be  a  kind  of  huge  monument  or  idol  or  shrine 
of  crowds.  It  seems  to  be  a  part  of  the  ceaseless  crowd  action 
or  crowd  corrosion  on  the  sense  of  identity  in  the  human 
spirit  that  the  man  who  fives  in  crowds  should  grow  more 
duU  and  more  literal  about  himself  every  day.  He  becomes 
a  mere  millionth  of  something.  All  these  other  people  he 
sees  about  him  hurrying  to  and  fro  are  mere  miUionths  too. 
He  grows  more  and  more  obliged  to  live  with  a  vast  bulk 
of  people  if  he  is  to  notice  people  at  all.  Unless  he  sees  all 
the  different  kinds  of  people  and  forms  of  life  with  his  own 
eye,  and  feels  human  beings  with  his  hands,  as  it  were,  he  does 
not  know  and  sympathize  with  them.  The  crowd-craving 
or  love  of  continual  city  life  on  the  part  of  many  people  comes 
to  be  a  sheer  lack  of  imagination,  an  inability  to  live  in  quali- 
ties instead  of  quantities  in  men.  To  five  merely  in  a  city  is  not 
to  know  the  real  flavour  of  life  any  more  than  the  daily  paper 
knows  it — the  daily  paper,  the  huge  dull  monster  of  observa- 
tion, the  seer  of  outsides.  The  whole  effect  of  crowds  on 
the  individual  man  is  to  emphasize  scareheads  and  appear- 
ances, advertisements,  and  the  huge  general  showing  off. 
The  ride  in  the  train  from  New  Haven  to  New  York  is  the 
true  portrait  of  a  crowd.  Crowds  of  soaps  and  patent  medi- 
cines straining  on  trees  and  signboard  out  of  the  gentle  fields 


288  CROWDS 

toward  crowds  of  men,  culminating  at  last  in  Woodlawn 
Cemetery,  where  the  marble  signposts  of  death  flaunt  them- 
selves. Oblivion  itself  is  advertised,  and  the  end  of  the  show 
of  a  show  world  is  placarded  on  our  graves.  Men  buy  space 
in  papers  for  cards,  and  bits  of  country  scenery  by  the  great 
railroads  to  put  up  signboards,  and  they  spend  money  and 
make  constant  efforts  to  advertise  that  they  are  alive,  and 
then  they  build  expensive  monuments  to  advertise  that  they 
are  dead.     .     .     . 

The  same  craving  for  piled-up  appearances  is  brought 
to  bear  by  crowds  upon  their  arts.  Even  a  gentle  soul  like 
Paderewski,  full  of  a  personal  and  strange  beauty  that  he 
could  lend  to  everything  he  touched,  finds  himself  swept  out 
of  himself  at  last  by  the  huge  undertow  of  crowds.  Scarcely 
a  season  but  his  playing  has  become  worn  down  at  the  end 
of  it  into  shrieks  and  hushes.  Have  I  not  watched  him  at 
the  end  of  a  tour,  when,  one  audience  after  the  other,  those  huge 
Svengalis  had  hypnotized  him  —  thundering  his  very  subtle- 
ties at  them,  hour  after  hour,  in  Carnegie  Hall?  One  could 
only  wonder  what  had  happened,  sit  by  helplessly,  watch 
the  crowd — thousands  of  headlong  human  beings  lunging 
their  souls  and  their  bodies  through  the  music,  weeping, 
gasping,  huzzaing,  and  clapping  to  one  another.  After 
every  crash  of  new  crescendo,  after  every  precipice  of  silence, 
they  seemed  to  be  crying,  "This  is  Soul!  Oh,  this  is  Soul!" 
The  feeling  of  a  vast  audience  holding  its  breath,  no  matter 
why  it  does  it  or  whether  it  ought  to  do  it  or  not,  seems  to 
have  become  almost  a  religious  rite  of  itself.  Vistas  of  faces 
gallery  after  gallery  hanging  on  a  note,  two  or  three  thousand 
souls  suspended  in  space  all  on  one  tiny  little  ivory  lever 
at  the  end  of  one  man's  forefinger  .  .  .  dim  lights  shining 
on  them  and  soft  vibrations  floating  round  them.  .  .  .  going  to 
hear  Paderewski  play  at  the  end  of  his  season  was  going  to 
hear  a  crowd  at  a  piano  singing  with  its  own  hands  and  having 
a  kind  of  orgy  with  itself.     One  could  only  remember  that 


THE  INCONVENIENCE  OF  BEING  HUMAN    289 

there  had  been  a  Paderewski  once  who  hypnotized  and  pos- 
sessed his  audience  by  being  hypnotized  and  possessed  by 
his  own  music.  One  liked  to  remember  him — the  Paderewski 
who  was  really  an  artist  and  who  performed  the  function 
of  the  artist  showering  imperiously  his  own  visions  on  the 
hearts  of  the  people. 

And  what  is  true  in  music  one  finds  still  truer  in  the  other 
arts.  One  keeps  coming  on  it  everywhere — the  egotism 
of  cities,  the  self-complacency  of  the  crowds  swerving  the 
finer  and  the  truer  artists  from  their  functions,  making  them 
sing  in  hoarse  crowd-voices  instead  of  singing  in  their  own 
and  giving  us  themselves.  Nearly  all  our  acting  has  been 
corroded  by  crowds.  Some  of  us  have  been  obliged  almost 
to  give  up  going  to  the  theatre  except  to  very  little  ones, 
and  we  are  wondering  if  churches  cannot  possibly  be  made 
small  enough  to  believe  great  things,  or  if  galleries  cannot 
be  arranged  with  few  enough  people  in  them  to  allow  us  great 
paintings,  or  if  there  will  not  be  an  author  so  well  known 
to  a  few  men  that  he  will  live  forever,  or  if  some  newspaper 
will  not  yet  be  great  enough  to  advertise  that  it  has  a  cir- 
culation small  enough  to  tell  the  truth. 


CHAPTER  IV 
LETTING  THE  CROWD  HAVE  PEOPLE  IN  IT 

SO  we  face  the  issue. 

Nothing  beautiful  can  be  accomphshed  in  a  crowd  civili- 
zation, by  the  crowd  for  the  crowd,  unless  the  crowd  is  beau- 
tiful. No  man  who  is  engaged  in  looking  under  the  lives 
about  him,  who  wishes  to  face  the  facts  of  these  lives  as  they 
are  lived  to-day,  will  find  himself  able  to  avoid  this  last  and 
most  important  fact  in  the  history  of  the  world — the  fact 
that,  whatever  it  may  mean,  or  whether  It  is  for  better  or 
worse,  the  world  has  staked  all  that  it  is  and  has  been,  and 
all  that  it  is  capable  of  being,  on  the  one  supreme  issue,  "How 
can  the  crowd  be  made  beautiful?" 

The  answer  to  this  question  involves  two  difficulties:  (1) 
A  crowd  cannot  make  itself  beautiful.  (2)  A  crowd  will 
not  let  any  one  else  make  it  beautiful. 

The  men  who  have  been  on  the  whole  the  most  eager 
democrats  of  history — the  real-idealists — the  men  who 
love  the  crowd  and  the  beautiful  too,  and  who  can  have  no 
honest  or  human  pleasure  in  either  of  them  except  as  they 
are  being  drawn  together,  are  obliged  to  admit  that  living 
in  a  democratic  country,  a  country  where  politics  and  aesthetics 
can  no  longer  be  kept  apart,  is  an  ordeal  that  can  only  be 
faced  a  large  part  of  the  time  with  heavy  hearts.  We  are 
obliged  to  admit  that  it  is  a  country  where  paintings  have 
little  but  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  wrought 
into  them;  where  sculpture  is  voted  and  paid  for  by  the  com- 
mon people;  where  music  is  composed  for  majorities;  where 
poetry  is  sung  to  a  circulation;  where  literature  itself  is  scaled 

290 


LETTING  THE  CROWD  HAVE  PEOPLE  IN  IT  291 

to  subscription  lists;  where  all  the  creators  of  the  True  and 
the  Beautiful  and  the  Good  may  be  seen  almost  any  day 
tramping  the  tableland  of  the  average  man,  fed  by  the  aver- 
age man,  allowed  to  live  by  the  average  man,  plodding  along 
with  weary  and  dusty  steps  to  the  average  man's  forgetful- 
ness.  And,  indeed,  it  is  not  the  least  trait  of  this  same  aver- 
age man  that  he  forgets,  that  he  is  forgotten,  that  his  slaves 
are  forgotten,  that  the  world  rememhers  only  those  who 
have  been  his  masters. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  literature  of  finding  fault  with  the 
average  man  (which  is  what  the  larger  part  of  our  more  am- 
bitious literature  really  is)  is  not  a  kind  of  literature  that 
can  do  anything  to  mend  matters.  The  art  of  finding  fault 
with  the  average  man,  with  the  fact  that  the  world  is  made 
convenient  for  him,  is  inferior  art  because  it  is  helpless  art. 
The  world  is  made  convenient  for  the  average  man  because 
it  has  to  be,  to  get  him  to  live  in  it;  and  if  the  world  were 
not  made  convenient  for  him,  the  man  of  genius  would  find 
living  with  him  a  great  deal  more  uncomfortable  than  he 
does.  He  would  not  even  be  allowed  the  comfort  of  saying 
how  uncomfortable.  The  world  belongs  to  the  average  man, 
and,  excepting  the  stars  and  other  things  that  are  too  big 
to  belong  to  him,  the  moment  the  average  man  deserves 
anything  better  in  it  or  more  beautiful  in  it  than  he  is  getting, 
some  man  of  genius  rises  by  his  side,  in  spite  of  him,  and 
claims  it  for  him.  Then  he  slowly  claims  it  for  himself.  The 
last  thing  to  do,  to  make  the  world  a  good  place  for  the  aver- 
age man,  would  be  to  make  it  a  world  with  nothing  but  aver- 
age men  in  it.  If  it  is  the  ideal  of  democracy  that  there  shall 
be  a  slow  massive  Ufting,  a  grading  up  of  all  things  at  once; 
that  whatever  is  highest  in  the  true  and  the  beautiful,  and 
whatever  is  lowest  in  them  shall  be  graded  down  and  graded 
up  to  the  middle  height  of  human  life,  where  the  greatest 
numbers  shall  make  their  home  and  live  upon  it;  if  the  ideal 
of  democracy  is  tableland  —  that  is  —  mountains  for  every- 


292  CROWDS 

body — a  few  mountains  must  be  kept  on  hand  to  make  table- 
land out  of. 

Two  solutions,  then,  of  a  crowd  civilization  —  having  the 
extraordinary  men  crowded  out  of  it  as  a  convenience  to 
the  average  ones,  and  having  the  average  men  crowded  out 
of  it  as  a  convenience  to  the  extraordinary  ones  —  are  equally 
impracticable. 

This  brings  us  to  the  horns  of  our  dilemma.  If  the  crowd 
cannot  be  made  beautiful  by  itself,  and  if  the  crowd  will  not 
allow  itself  to  be  made  beautiful  by  any  one  else,  the  crowd 
can  only  be  made  beautiful  by  a  man  who  lives  so  great  a  life 
in  it  that  he  can  make  a  crowd  beautiful  whether  it  allows 
him  to  or  not. 

When  this  man  is  born  to  us  and  looks  out  on  the  condi- 
tions around  him,  he  will  find  that  to  be  born  in  a  crowd  civili- 
zation is  to  be  born  in  a  civilization,  first,  in  which  every 
man  can  do  as  he  pleases;  second,  in  which  nobody  does. 
Every  man  is  given  by  the  Government  absolute  freedom; 
and 'when  it  has  given  him  absolute  freedom  the  Government 
says  to  him,  "Now  if  you  can  get  enough  other  men,  with 
their  absolute  freedom,  to  put  their  absolute  freedom  with 
your  absolute  freedom,  you  can  use  your  absolute  freedom 
in  any  way  you  want."  Democracy,  seeking  to  free  a  man 
from  being  a  slave  to  one  master,  has  simply  increased  the 
number  of  masters  a  man  shall  have.  He  is  hemmed  in  with 
crowds  of  masters.  He  cannot  see  his  master's  huge  amor- 
phous face.  He  cannot  go  to  his  master  and  reason  with  him. 
He  cannot  even  plead  with  him.  You  can  cry  your  heart 
out  to  one  of  these  modern  ballot-boxes.  You  have  but 
one  ballot.  They  will  not  count  tears.  The  ultimate  ques- 
tion in  a  crowd  civilization  becomes,  not  "What  does  a  thing 
mean?"  or  "What  is  it  worth?"  but  "How  much  is  there 
of  it?"  "If  thou  art  a  great  man,"  says  civilization,  "get 
thou  a  crowd  for  thy  greatness.  Then  come  with  thy  crowd 
and  we  will  deal  with  thee.     It  shall  be  even  as  thou  wilt." 


LETTING  THE  CROWD  HAVE  PEOPLE  IN  IT  293 

The  pressure  has  become  so  great,  as  is  obvious  on  every  side, 
that  men  who  are  of  small  or  ordinary  calibre  can  only  be 
more  pressed  by  it.  They  are  pressed  smaller  and  smaller  — 
the  more  they  are  civilized,  the  smaller  they  are  pressed; 
and  we  are  being  daily  brought  face  to  face  with  the  fact 
that  the  one  solution  a  crowd  civilization  can  have  for  the 
evil  of  being  a  crowd  civilization  is  the  man  in  the  crowd 
who  can  withstand  the  pressure  of  the  crowd;  that  is  to  say, 
the  one  solution  of  a  crowd  civilization  is  the  great-man  solu- 
tion— a  solution  which  is  none  the  less  true  because  by  name, 
at  least,  it  leaves  most  of  us  out  or  because  it  is  so  familiar 
that  we  have  forgotten  it.  The  one  method  by  which  a  crowd 
can  be  freed  and  can  be  made  to  realize  itself  is  the  great- 
man  method  —  the  method  of  crucifying  and  worshipping 
great  men,  until  by  crucifying  and  worshipping  great  men 
enough,  inch  by  inch,  and  era  by  era,  it  is  lifted  to  great- 
ness itself. 

Not  very  many  years  ago,  certain  great  and  good  men, 
who,  at  the  cost  of  infinite  pains,  were  standing  at  the  time 
on  a  safe  and  lofty  rock  protected  from  the  fury  of  their  kind 
by  the  fury  of  the  sea,  contrived  to  say  to  the  older  nations 
of  the  earth,  "All  men  are  created  equal."  It  is  a  thing  to 
be  borne  in  mind,  that  if  these  men,  who  declared  that  all 
men  were  created  equal,  had  not  been  some  several  hundred 
per  cent,  better  men  than  the  men  they  said  they  were  cre- 
ated equal  to,  it  would  not  have  made  any  difference  to  us  or 
to  any  one  else  whether  they  had  said  that  all  men  were  cre- 
ated equal  or  not,or  whether  the  Republic  had  ever  been  started 
or  not,  in  which  every  man,  for  hundreds  of  years,  should 
look  up  to  these  men  and  worship  them  as  the  kind  of  men  that 
every  man  in  America  was  free  to  try  to  be  equal  to.  A  civili- 
zation by  numbers,  a  crowd  civilization,  if  it  had  not  been 
started  by  heroes,  could  never  have  been  started  at  alL  Shall 
this  civilization  attempt  to  live  by  the  crowd  principle,  with- 
out men  in  it  who  are  living  by  the  hero  principle?     On  our 


294  CROWDS 

answer  to  this  question  hangs  the  question  whether  this  civiH- 
zation,  with  all  its  crowds,  shall  stand  or  fall  among  the  civili- 
zations of  the  earth.  The  main  difference  between  the  heroes 
of  Plymouth  Rock,  the  heroes  who  proclaimed  freedom  in 
1776,  and  the  heroes  who  must  contrive  to  proclaim  freedom 
now,  is  that  tyranny  now  is  crowding  around  the  Rock,  and 
climbing  up  on  the  Rock,  eighty-seven  million  strong,  and 
that  tyranny  then  was  a  half-idiot  king  three  thousand  miles 
away. 


We  know  or  think  we  know,  some  of  us — at  least  we  have 
taken  a  certain  joy  in  working  it  out  in  our  minds,  and  live 
with  it  every  day — how  people  in  crowds  are  going  to  be 
beautiful  by  and  by. 

The  difficulty  of  being  beautiful  now,  I  have  tried  to  express. 
It  seems  better  to  express,  if  possible,  what  a  difficulty  is 
before  trying  to  meet  it 

And  now  we  would  like  to  try  to  meet  it.  How  can  we 
determine  what  is  the  most  practical  and  natural  way  for 
crowds  of  people  to  try  to  be  beautiful  now? 

It  would  seem  to  be  a  matter  of  crowd  psychology,  of  crowd 
technique,  and  of  determining  how  human  nature  works. 

All  thoughtful  people  are  agreed  as  to  the  aim. 

Everything  turns  on  the  method. 

In  the  following  chapters  we  will  try  to  consider  the  tech. 
nique  of  being  beautiful  in  crowds. 


BOOK  FOUR 
CROWDS  AND  HEROES 

TO  WALT   WHITMAN 

"  And  I  saw  the  free  souls  of  poets. 

The  loftiest  bards  of  all  ages  strode  before  me 

Strange  large   men,  long   unwaked,  undisclosed,  were  disclosed 

to  me 
.     .     .     0  my  rapt  verse,  my  call,  mock  me  not! 
.     .     .     I  will  not  be  outfaced  by  irrational  things, 
I  will  penetrate  what  is  sarcastic  upon  me, 
I  will  make  cities  and  civilizations  defer  to  me 
This  is  what  I  have  learnt  from  America  — 

/  icill  confront  these  shows  of  the  day  and  night 

I  will  know  if  I  am  to  be  less  than  they, 

I  will  see  if  I  am  not  as  majestic  as  they, 

I  icill  see  if  I  am  not  as  subtle  and  real  as  they, 

I  tvill  see  if  I  have  no  meaning  while  the  houses  and  ships  have 

meaning, 
.     .     .     I  am  for  those  that  have  never  been  mastered. 
For  men  and  women  whose  tempers  have  never  been  mastered. 
For  those  whom  laivs,  theories,  conventions  can  never  master. 

I  am  for  those  who  walk  abreast  of  the  whole  earth 
Who  inaugurate  one  to  inaugurate  all." 


CHAPTER  I 
THE  SOCIALIST  AND  THE  HERO 

I  WAS  spending  a  little  time  not  long  ago  with  a  man  of  singu- 
larly devoted  and  noble  spirit  who  had  dedicated  his  life  and  his 
fortune  to  the  Socialist  movement.  We  had  had  several  talks 
before,  and  always  with  a  little  flurry  at  first  of  hopefulness 
toward  one  another's  ideas.  We  both  felt  that  the  other,  for  a 
mere  Socialist  or  for  a  mere  Individualist,  was  really  rather 
reasonable.  We  admitted  great  tracts  of  things  to  one  another, 
and  we  always  felt  as  if  by  this  one  next  argument,  perchance, 
or  by  one  further  illustration,  we  would  convince  the  other  and 
rescue  him  like  a  brand  from  the  burning. 

The  last  time  I  saw  him  he  started  in  at  once  at  the  station  as 
we  climbed  up  into  the  car  by  telling  me  what  he  was  doing. 
He  was  studying  up  the  heroes  of  the  American  Revolution,  and 
was  writing  something  to  show  that  they  were  not  really  heroes 
after  all.  All  manner  of  things  were  the  matter  with  them. 
They  had  always  troubled  him,  he  said.  He  knew  there  was 
something  wrong,  and  he  was  glad  to  have  the  matter  settled. 

He  said  he  did  not,  and  never  had  believed  in  heroes,  and 
thought  they  did  a  great  deal  of  harm  —  even  dead  ones. 
Heroes,  he  said,  always  deceived  the  people.  They  kept  people 
from  seeing  that  nothing  could  be  done  in  our  modem  society 
by  any  one  man.  Only  crowds  could  do  things,  he  intimated 
—  each  man,  like  one  little  wave  on  the  world,  wavering  up  to 
the  shore  and  dying  away. 

As  the  evening  wore  on  our  conversation  became  more  con- 
crete, and  I  began  to  drag  in,  of  course,  every  now  and  then, 
naturally,  an  inspired  or  semi-inspired  millionaire  or  so. 


298  CROWDS 

I  cannot  say  that  these  gentlemen  were  received  with  en- 
thusiasm. 

Finally,  I  turned  on  him.  "What  is  it  that  makes  you  so 
angry  (and  nearly  all  the  Socialists)  every  time  you  hear 
something  good,  something  you  cannot  deny  is  good,  about 
a  successful  business  man?  If  I  brought  a  row  of  inspired 
millionaires,  say  ten  or  twelve  of  them  one  after  the  other, 
into  your  Ubrary  this  minute,  you  would  get  hotter  and 
hotter  with  every  one,  wouldn't  you.?  You  would  scarcely 
speak  to  me." 

intimated  that  he  was  afraid  I  was  deceived;  he  was 

afraid  that  I  was  going  about  deceiving  other  people  about  its 
being  possible  for  mere  individual  men  to  be  good;  he  was  afraid 
I  was  doing  a  great  deal  of  damage. 

He  then  confided  to  me  that  not  so  very  long  ago  he  dropped 
in  one  Monday  morning  into  his  guest-chamber  just  after  his 
guest  had  gone  and  found  a  copy  of  "Inspired  Millionaires," 
which  his  guest  had  obviously  been  reading  over  Sunday,  lying 
on  the  little  reading- table  at  the  head  of  the  bed. 

He  said  that  he  took  the  book  back  to  his  library,  took  out 
two  or  three  encyclopaedias  from  the  shelf  in  the  corner,  put 
my  inspired  millionaires  in  behind  them,  put  the  encyclopaedias 
back,  and  that  they  had  been  there  to  this  day. 

With  this  very  generous  and  kindly  introduction  we  went  on 
to  a  frank  talk  on  the  general  attitude  of  Socialists  toward  the 
instinct  of  hero-worship  in  human  nature. 

A  Socialist  had  said  only  a  few  days  before,  speaking  of  a 
certain  municipal  movement  in  which  the  people  were  inter- 
ested, that  he  thought  it  really  had  a  very  good  chance  to  suc- 
ceed "if  only  the  heroes  could  be  staved  off  a  little  longer." 
He  deprecated  the  almost  incurable  idea  people  seemed  to  have 
that  nothing  could  ever  be  done  in  this  world  without  being  all 
mixed  up  with  heroes. 

My  mind  kept  recurring  in  a  perplexed  way  to  this  remark 
for  a  few  days  after  I  had  heard  it,  and  I  soon  came  on  the  f^^' 


THE  SOCIALIST  AND  THE  HERO  299 

lowing  letter  from  a  prominent  Socialist  which  had  been  read  at 
a  dinner  the  night  before: 

"  I  am  glad  to  join  with  others  of  my  comrades  in  conveying 
greetings  to  Comrade  Cahan  on  the  occasion  of  the  fiftieth  anni- 
versary of  his  birth,  and  in  recognition  of  the  eminent  services 
that  he  has  rendered  in  the  Socialist  movement. 

"Yet  my  gladness  is  not  untinged  with  a  certain  note  of 
apprehension  lest  in  expressing  so  conspicuously  our  esteem  of 
an  honoured  comrade  we  obscure  the  broader  scene  which,  if 
equally  illumined,  would  disclose  tens  of  thousands  of  other 
comrades,  labouring  with  equal  devotion,  and  each  no  less 
worthy  of  praise. 

"In  our  rejoicing  over  the  services  of  Comrade  Cahan  let 
us  not  forget  that  the  facilities  that  he  and  that  each  of  us 
enjoy  are  the  products  of  thousands  of  other  men  and  women, 
and  sometimes  of  children  too. 

"In  our  rejoicing  let  us  recall  that  we  cannot  safely  assume 
that  any  comrade's  services  to  the  movement  have  been  greater 
than  the  movement's  services  to  him;  that  we  are  but  fellow- 
workers  together,  deriving  help  and  perhaps  inspiration  one 
from  another  and  each  from  all. 

"In  our  rejoicing  let  us  place  the  emphasis  rather  upon  the 
services  of  the  many  to  each,  than  upon  the  services  of  any  one 
of  the  many." 

I  have  not  quoted  from  this  letter  because  I  disagree  with  the 
idea  in  it.  I  am  ready  to  admit  that  though  the  idea  is  a  some  • 
what  dampening  one  perhaps  for  a  banquet,  it  is  true  and 
important. 

WTiat  I  object  to  in  the  letter  is  the  Fear  in  it. 

In  spite  of  the  fineness  and  truth  of  the  motive  that  lies,  I  know, 
underneath  every  line,  the  letter  is  baleful,  sinister,  and  weary. 

I  accuse  the  letter  of  being,  in  a  kind  of  nobly  sick  way, 
visionary,  unpractical,  and  socially  destructive. 


300  CROWDS 

T  would  heartily  agree  with  the  writer  of  the  letter  about  the 
quality  of  many  heroes,  possibly  about  most  heroes.  I  would 
agree  in  a  large  measure  that  the  heroes  the  crowds  choose  are 
the  wrong  ones. 

But  there  is  a  great  difference  between  his  belief  and  mine  as 
to  our  practical  working  policy  in  getting  the  things  for  crowds 
that  we  both  want  for  them.  It  seems  to  me  that  he  does  not 
believe  in  crowds.  He  is  filled  with  fear  that  they  would  select 
the  wrong  heroes.  He  says  they  must  not  have  heroes,  or 
must  be  allowed  as  few  as  possible. 

I  believe  in  crowds,  and  I  believe  that  the  more  they  have  the 
hero-habit,  the  more  heroes  they  have  to  compare  and  select 
from,  the  finer,  longer,  and  truer  heroes  they  will  select,  the 
more  deeply,  truly,  and  concretely  the  crowds  will  think, and  the 
more  nobly  they  will  express  themselves. 

But  the  great  argument  for  the  hero  as  a  social  method  is 
that  the  crowd  in  a  clumsy,  wistful  way,  deep  down  in  its  heart, 
in  the  long  run,  loves  the  beautiful.  Appealing  to  the  crowd's 
ideal  of  the  beautiful  in  conduct,  its  sense  of  the  heroic,  or  semi- 
heroic,  is  the  only  practical,  hard-headed  understanding  way  of 
getting  out  of  the  crowd,  for  the  crowd,  what  the  crowd  wants. 

I  saw  the  other  day  in  Boston  several  thousand  schoolboys 
in  the  street  keeping  step.  It  was  a  band  that  held  them 
together.     A  band  is  a  practical  thing. 

Is  it  not  about  time,  in  our  dreary,  drab,  listless  procession  of 
economics,  stringing  helplessly  across  the  world,  that  we  have 
a  band  of  music  .f^     What  economics  needs  now  is  a  march. 

We  have  to-day  a  thousand  men  who  can  tell  people  what  to 
do  where  wf  have  one  Vho  can  touch  the  music,  the  dance,  the 
hurrah,  the  cry,  the  worship  in  them,  and  make  them  want  to 
do  something.  The  hero  is  the  man  who  makes  people  want  to 
do  something,  and  strangely  and  subtly,  all  through  the  blood, 
while  they  watch  him,  he  makes  them  believe  they  can. 

It  is  socially  destructive  to  throw  away  the  overpowering 
instinct  of  human  nature  which  we  have  called  hero-worship. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  CROWD  AND  THE  HERO 

BUT  it  is  not  only  socially  destructive.  It  is  dumb  and  help- 
less for  crowds  to  try  to  get  on  without  heroes.  Big  events  and 
big  men  are  crowd  expressions.  Heroes,  World  Fairs,  and 
Titanic  disasters  are  crowd  words,  the  crowd's  way  of  seeing 
and  saying  things. 

Crowds  think  in  great  men,  or  they  think  in  simple,  big, 
broadly  drawn  events,  or  words  of  one  syllable,  like  coal  strikes. 

A  whole  world  works  through  to  an  entirely  new  idea,  the 
idea  that  England  is  not  necessarily  impregnable,  in  the  Boer 
war.  And  we  see  England,  by  way  of  South  Africa,  searching 
her  own  heart.  The  Meat  Trust,  by  raising  prices  for  a  few 
trial  weeks,  makes  half  a  nation  think  its  way  over  into  vege- 
tarianism or  semi-vegetarianism. 

In  the  American  war  with  Spain  modern  thought  attacked 
the  last  pathetic  citadel  in  modern  life  of  poUte  illusion,  of 
he-poetry,  and  in  that  one  little  flash  of  war  between  the  Spain 
spirit  and  the  American  spirit,  in  our  modern  world,  the 
nations  got  their  final  and  conclusive  sense  of  what  the  Spanish 
civilization  really  was,  of  the  old  Don  Quixote  thinking,  of  the 
delightful,  brave,  courtly  blindness,  of  the  world's  last  strong- 
hold of  pomposity,  of  vague,  empty  prettiness,  of  talking  grand 
and  shooting  crooked. 

Japan  and  Russia  fight  with  guns,  but  the  real  fight  is  not 
between  their  guns,  but  between  two  great  national  concep- 
tions of  human  life.  Like  two  vast  national  searchhghts  we 
saw  them  turned  on  each  other,  two  huge,  grim,  naked  civihza- 
tions,  and  now  in  an  awful  light  and  roar,  and  now  in  stately 

?C1 


302  CROWDS 

sudden  silence,  while  we  all  looked  on,  all  breathless  and  con- 
centrated, we  saw  them,  as  on  some  strange  vast  stage  of  the 
world,  all  lit  up,  exposed,  penetrated  by  the  minds  of  men  for- 
ever. While  they  fought  before  us  we  saw  the  last  two 
thousand  years  flash  up  once  more  and  fade  away,  and  then  the 
next  two  thousand  years  on  its  slide,  with  one  click  before  our 
faces  was  fastened  into  place. 

Men  see  great  spiritual  conceptions  or  ideals  for  a  world 
when  the  great  ideals  are  dramatized,  when  they  stalk  out  before 
us,  are  acted  out  before  our  eyes  by  mighty  nations.  Before 
the  stage  we  sit  silently  and  think  and  watch  the  ideals  of  a 
world,  the  souls  of  the  nations  struggling  together,  and  as  we 
watch  we  discover  our  souls  for  ourselves,  we  define  our  ideals 
for  ourselves.  We  make  up  our  minds.  We  see  what  we  want. 
We  begin  to  live. 

I  have  come  to  believe  that  the  hero,  in  the  same  way,  is  the 
common  man's  desire  and  prayer  writ  large.  It  is  his  way  of 
keeping  it  refreshed  before  him  so  that  he  sees  it,  recalls  it, 
suns  himself  in  it,  lifts  up  his  life  to  it,  every  day. 


CHAPTER  III 
THE  CROWD  AND  THE  AVERAGE  PERSON 

TO  STATE  still  further  my  difference  with  the  typical  Social- 
ist point  of  view,  as  expressed  in  the  letter  from  which  I  have 
quoted,  I  am  obliged  to  confess  that  I  not  only  believe  in  having 
heroes  on  behalf  of  crowds,  but  in  having  as  a  regular  method 
of  democracy  httle  crowds  of  heroes,  or  an  aristocracy.  In 
other  words,  I  am  a  democrat.  I  believe  that  crowds  can  pro- 
duce, and  are  bound  to  produce  by  a  natural  crowd-process,  a 
real  aristocracy  —  an  aristocracy  which  will  be  truly  aristo- 
cratic and  noble  in  spirit  and  action,  and  which  will  express  the 
best  ideas  in  the  best  way  that  a  crowd  can  have. 

The  main  business  of  a  democracy  is  to  find  out  which  these 
people  are  in  it  and  put  them  where  they  will  represent  it.  The 
trouble  seems  to  have  been  in  democracies  so  far,  that  we  find 
out  who  these  people  are  a  generation  too  late.  The  great  and 
rare  moments  of  history  have  been  those  in  which  we  have 
found  out  who  they  were  in  time,  as  when  we  found  in  America 
Abraham  Lincoln,  an  unaristocratic-looking  and  ungainly  man, 
and  saw  suddenly  that  he  was  the  first  gentleman  in  the  United 
States. 

The  next  great  task  of  democracy  is  to  determine  the  best 
means  it  can  of  finding  out  who  its  aristocrats  are,  its  all-men,  and 
determining  who  they  are  in  time,  men  who  have  vision,  courage, 
individuality,  imagination  enough  to  face  real  things,  and  to 
know  real  people,  and  to  put  real  things  and  real  people  together. 

It  is  what  an  aristocracy  in  a  democratic  form  of  government 
is  for,  to  furnish  imagination  to  crowds.  A  real  aristocracy  is 
the  only  clear-headed,  practical  means  a  great  nation  can  have 

303 


304  CROWDS 

of  distributing,  classifying,  and  digesting  and  evoking  hordes 
of  men  and  women.  People  do  not  have  imagination  in  hordes, 
and  imagination  is  latent  and  unorganized  in  masses  of  people. 
The  crowd  problem  is  the  problem  of  having  leaders  who  can 
fertilize  the  imagination  and  organize  the  will  of  crowds.  Noth- 
ing but  worship  or  great  desire  has  ever  been  able  to  focus  a 
crowd,  and  only  the  great  man,  rich  and  various  in  his  elements, 
abounding,  great  as  the  crowd  is  great,  can  ever  hope  to  do  it. 

Every  man  in  a  crowd  knows  that  he  is  or  is  in  danger  ot 
being  a  mere  Me-man,  or  a  mere  class-man,  and  he  knows  that 
his  neighbour  is,  and  he  wishes  to  be  in  a  world  that  is  saved 
from  his  own  mere  me-ness  and  his  own  mere  classness.  His 
hero-worship  is  his  way  of  worshipping  his  larger  self.  He  com- 
munes with  his  possible  or  completed  self,  his  self  of  the  best 
moments  in  the  oflScial  great  man  or  crowd  man. 

The  average  man  in  a  crowd  does  not  want  to  be  an  average 
man,  and  the  last  thing  he  wants  is  to  have  an  average  man  to 
represent  him.  He  wants  a  man  to  represent  him  as  he  would 
like  to  be. 

He  cannot  express  himself  —  his  best  self,  in  the  State,  to 
all  the  others  in  the  State,  without  a  lifted-up  man  or  crowd 
man  to  do  it. 

It  is  as  if  he  said  —  as  if  the  average  man  said,  "I  want  a 
certain  sort  of  world,  I  want  to  be  able  to  point  to  a  man,  to  a 
particular  man,  and  say,  as  I  look  at  him  and  ask  others  to  look 
at  him,  'This  is  the  sort  of  world  I  want.'" 

Then  everybody  knows. 

The  great  world  that  lies  in  all  men's  hearts  is  expressed  in 
miniature,  in  the  great  man. 

Crowds  speak  in  heroes. 


I  have  often  heard  Socialists  wondering  among  themselves 
why  a  movement  that  had  so  many  fine  insights  and  so  many 
noble  motives  behind  it  had  produced  so  few  artists 


THE  CROWD  AND  THE  AVERAGE  PERSON  305 

It  has  seemed  to  me  that  it  might  be  because  Socialists  as  a 
class,  speaking  roughly,  are  generalizers.  They  do  not  see 
vividly  and  deeply  the  universal  in  the  particular,  the  universal 
in  the  individual,  the  national  in  the  local.  They  are  convinced 
by  counting,  and  are  moved  by  masses,  and  are  prone  to  over- 
look the  Spirit  of  the  Little,  the  immensity  of  the  seed  and  of 
the  individual.  They  are  prone  to  look  past  the  next  single 
thing  to  be  done.  They  look  past  the  next  single  man  to  be 
fulfiUed. 

They  feel  a  bit  superior  to  Individualists  for  the  way  they 
have  of  seeing  the  universal  in  the  particular,  and  of  being  pic- 
turesque and  personal. 

Socialists  are  not  picturesque  and  personal.  They  do  not 
think  in  pictures. 

Then  they  wonder  why  they  do  not  make  more  headway. 

Crowds  and  great  men  and  children  think  in  pictures. 

A  hero  pictures  greatness  to  them.  Then  they  want  it  for 
themselves. 

From  the  practical,  political  point  of  view  of  getting  things 
for  crowds,  perhaps  the  trouble  lies,  not  in  our  common  popular 
idea  of  having  heroes,  but  in  the  heroes.  And  perhaps  the  cure 
lies  not  in  abolishing  heroes,  but  In  making  our  heroes  move  on 
and  in  insisting  on  more  and  better  ones. 

Any  man  who  looks  may  watch  the  crowd  to-day  making  its 
heroes  move  on. 

If  they  do  not  move  on,  the  crowd  picks  up  the  next  hero  at 
hand  who  is  moving  —  and  drops  them. 

One  can  watch  In  every  civilized  country  to-day  crowds 
picking  up  heroes,  comparing,  sorting,  selecting,  seeing  the  ones 
that  wear  the  longest,  and  one  by  one  taking  the  old  ones  down. 

The  crowd  takes  a  hero  up  In  Its  huge  rough  hand,  gazes 
through  him  at  the  world,  sees  what  it  wants  through  him. 
Then  it  takes  up  another,  and  then  another. 

Heroes  are  crowd  spy-glasses. 

Pierpont  Morgan  and  Tom  Mann  for  example. 


306  CROWDS 

Pierpont  Morgan  is  a  typical  American  business  man  raised 
to  the  °th  or  hero  power. 

The  crowd  thinks  it  is  interesting  to  take  up  Pierpont  Mor- 
gan, the  Tom  Mann  of  the  banks.  It  will  see  what  it  wants, 
through  him. 

And  the  crowd  thinks  it  is  interesting  to  take  up  Tom  Mann, 
too,  the  Pierpont  Morgan  of  the  Trades  Unions.  It  will  see 
what  it  wants,  through  him. 


CHAPTER  IV 
THE  CROWD  AND  PIERPONT  MORGAN 

ONE  keeps  turning  back  every  now  and  then,  in  reading  the 
"Life  of  Pierpont  Morgan,"  to  the  portrait  which  Carl  Hovey 
has  placed  at  the  beginning  of  the  book.  If  one  were  to  look  at 
the  portrait  long  enough,  one  would  not  need  to  read  the  book. 
The  portrait  puts  into  a  few  square  inches  of  space  what  Mr. 
Hovey  takes  half  an  acre  of  paper  for.  And  all  that  he  really 
does  on  the  half-acre  of  paper  is  to  bring  back  to  one  again 
and  again  that  set  and  focused  look  one  sees  in  Mr.  Morgan's 
eyes  —  the  remoteness,  the  sUence,  the  amazing,  dogged,  im- 
placable concentration,  and,  when  all  is  said,  a  certain  terrible, 
inexplicable  blindness. 

The  blindness  keeps  one  looking  again.  One  cannot  quite 
believe  it.  The  portrait  has  something  so  strong,  so  almost 
noble  and  commanding,  about  it  that  one  cannot  but  stand 
back  with  one's  little  judgments  and  give  the  man  who  can  hurl 
together  out  of  the  bewilderment  of  the  world  a  personality 
like  this,  and  fix  it  here  —  all  in  one  small  human  face  —  the 
benefit  of  the  doubt.  This  is  the  way  the  crowd  has  always 
taken  Pierpont  Morgan  at  first.  The  bare  spectacle  of  a  man 
so  magnificently  set,  so  imperiously  preoccupied,  silences  our 
judgments.  It  seems  as  if,  of  course,  he  must  be  seeing  things 
—  things  that  we  and  others  possibly  do  not  and  cannot  see. 
The  blindness  in  the  eyes  is  so  complete  and  set  in  such  a  full 
array  that  it  acts  at  first  on  one  almost  like  a  kind  of  vision. 
The  eyes  hold  themselves  like  pictures  of  eyes,  like  little  walls, 
as  if  real  eyes  were  in  behind  them.  One  wonders  if  there  is  any 
one  who  could  ever  manage  to  break  through  them,  fleck  up  little 

SOT 


308  •  CROWDS 

ordinary  human  things  —  personahty,  for  instance,  atmosphere, 
or  light  —  against  them.  If  Shakespeare,  whose  folios  he  has, 
and  Keats,  whose  "Endymion"  he  owns,  or  Milton,  whose  "Par- 
adise Lost"  he  keeps  in  his  safe,  were  all  to  assail  him  at  once, 
were  to  bear  down  upon  that  set  look  in  Pierpont  Morgan's  eyes 

—  try  to  get  them  to  turn  one  side  a  second  and  notice  that  they 

—  Shakespeare  and  Milton  and  Keats  —  were  there,  there 
would  not  be  a  flicker  or  shadow  of  movement.  They  are  eyes 
that  are  set  like  jaws,  like  magnificent  spiritual  muscles,  on 
Something.     Neither  do  they  reveal  light  or  receive  it. 


It  will  be  some  time  before  the  crowd  will  find  it  possible  to 
hand  in  an  account  and  render  a  full  estimate  of  the  value  of  the 
service  that  Pierpont  Morgan  has  rendered  to  our  modern 
world;  but  the  service  has  been  for  the  most  part  rendered  now 
and  while  the  world,  in  its  mingled  dismay  and  gratitude  at  the 
way  he  has  hammered  it  together,  is  distributing  its  praise  and 
blame,  there  are  some  of  us  who  would  like  to  step  one  side  a  little 
and  think  quietly,  if  we  may,  not  about  what  Pierpont  Morgan 
has  done,  which  we  admit  duly,  but  about  the  blindness  in  his 
eyes.  It  is  Pierpont  Morgan's  blindness  that  interests  the 
crowd  more  than  anything  else  about  him  interests  them  now. 
It  is  his  blindness  —  and  the  chance  to  find  out  just  what  it  is 
that  is  making  people  read  his  book.  His  blindness  (if  we  can 
fix  just  what  it  is)  is  the  thing  that  we  are  going  to  make  our  next 
Pierpont  Morgan  out  of.  The  next  Pierpont  Morgan  —  the 
one  the  crowd  is  getting  ready  now  —  will  be  made  out  of  the 
things  that  this  Pierpont  Morgan  did  not  see.  What  are  these 
things?  We  have  been  looking  for  the  things  in  Carl  Hovey's 
book,  peering  in  between  the  lines  on  every  page,  and  turning 
up  his  adjectives  and  looking  under  them,  his  adverbs  and  quali- 
fications, his  shrewdness  and  carefulness  for  the  things  that 
Pierpont  Morgan  did  not  see.  Pierpont  Morgan  himself 
would  not  have  tried  to  hide  them,  and  neither  has  his  biog- 


THE  CROWD  AND  PIERPONT  MORGAN      309 

rapher.  His  whole  book  breathes  throughout  with  a  just- 
raindedness,  a  spirit  of  truth,  a  necessary  and  inevitable  hon- 
esty, which  of  itself  is  not  the  least  testimony  to  the  essential 
validity  and  soundness  of  Morgan's  career.  Pierpont  Mor- 
gan's attitude  toward  his  biography  (if,  in  spite  of  his  reticence, 
it  became  one  of  the  necessities  —  even  one  of  the  industrial 
necessities,  of  the  world  that  he  should  have  one)  was  prob- 
ably a  good  deal  the  attitude  of  Walt  Whitman  when  he  told 
Traubel,  "Whatever  you  do  with  me,  don't  prettify  me";  and 
if  there  were  things  in  Mr.  Morgan' scarcer  which  he  imperturb- 
ably  failed  to  see,  Mr.  Morgan  himself  would  be  the  last  man 
not  to  try  to  help  people  to  find  out  what  they  are.  But  living 
has  been  to  Mr.  Morgan  as  it  is  to  us  (as  I  write  these  hnes  he 
is  seventy-four  years  old)  a  serious,  bottomless  business.  He 
does  not  know  which  the  things  are  he  has  not  seen.  His 
eyes  are  magnificently  set.  They  cannot  help  us.  We  must 
do  our  own  looking. 


If  I  were  called  upon  to  speak  very  quickly  and  without 
warning;  if  any  one  suddenly  expected  me  in  my  first  sentence 
to  hit  the  bull's-eye  of  Mr.  Morgan's  blindness,  I  think  I  would 
try  socialism.  WTien  the  Emperor  WiUiam  was  giving  himself 
the  treat  of  talking  with  the  man  who  runs,  or  is  supposed  to 
run,  the  economics  of  a  world,  he  found  that  he  was  talking  with 
a  man  who  had  not  noticed  socialism  yet,  and  who  was  not  in- 
terested in  it.  Most  people  would  probably  have  said  that 
Morgan  was  not  interested  in  socialism  enough;  but  there  are 
very  few  people  who  would  not  be  as  surprised  as  Emperor  Wil- 
liam was  to  know  that  he,  Pierpont  Morgan,  was  not  informed 
about  the  greatest  and,  to  some  of  us,  the  most  threatening, 
omnipresent,  and  significant  spectre  in  modern  industrial  life. 

But  when  one  thinks  of  it,  and,  when  more  particularly,  one 
looks  again  at  that  set  look  in  his  eyes,  I  cannot  see  how  it 
could  possibly  have  been  otherwise.     If  Morgan's  eyes  had 


310  CROWDS 

suddenly  begun  seeing  all  sorts  of  human  things  —  the  bewilder- 
ing welter  of  the  individual  minds,  the  tragedy  of  the  individual 
interests  around  him;  if  be  had  lost  his  imperious  sense  of  a 
whole  —  had  tried  to  potter  over  and  piece  together,  like  the 
good  people  and  the  wonderers,  the  innumerable  entangled  wires 
of  the  world,  his  eyes  might  have  been  filled  perhaps  with  the 
beautiful  and  helpless  light  of  the  philosophers,  with  the  fire  of 
the  prophets,  or  with  the  gentle  paralysis  of  the  poets,  but  he 
never  would  have  had  the  courage  to  do  the  great  work  of  his 
life  —  to  turn  down  forever  those  iron  shutters  on  his  eyes 
and  smite  a  world  together. 

There  was  one  thing  this  poor,  dizzied,  scattered  planet 
needed.  With  its  quarrelling  and  its  peevish  industries,  its 
sick  poets  and  its  tired  religions,  the  one  thing  this  planet 
needed  was  a  Blow;  it  needed  a  man  that  could  hammer  it  to- 
gether. To  find  fault  with  this  man  for  not  being  a  seer,  or  to 
feel  superior  to  him  for  not  being  an  idealist,  or  to  heckle  him 
for  not  being  a  sociologist,  when  here  he  was  all  the  time  with 
this  mighty  frenzy  or  heat  in  him  that  could  melt  down  the 
chaos  of  a  world  while  we  looked,  weld  it  to  his  will,  and  then 
lift  his  arm  and  smite  it,  though  all  men  said  him  nay  —  back 
into  a  world  again  —  to  haggle  over  this  man's  not  being  a  com- 
plete sociologist  or  professor  is  not  worthy  of  thoughtful  and 
manful  men. 

I  cannot  express  it,  but  I  can  only  declare,  living  as  I  do  in  a 
day  like  this,  that  to  me  there  is  a  kind  of  colossal  naked  poetry 
in  what  Pierpont  Morgan  has  done  which  I  cannot  but  acknowl- 
edge with  gratitude  and  hope.  Though  there  be  in  it,  as  in 
aU  massive  things,  a  brutality  perhaps  like  that  of  the  moving 
glaciers,  like  the  making  and  boiling  of  coal  in  the  earth,  like 
death,  like  childbirth,  like  the  impersonality  of  the  sea,  my 
imagination  can  never  get  past  a  kind  of  elemental,  almost 
heathen  poetry  or  heathen-god  poetry  in  Pierpont  Morgan's 
Blow  or  shock  upon  our  world.  There  may  be  reason  to  doubt 
as  to  whether  it  is  to  be  called  a. heaven-poetry  or  a  hell-poetry 


THE  CROWD  AND  PIERPONT  MORGAN      311 

—  something  so  gaunt  and  simple  is  there  about  it;  but  here 
we  are  with  all  our  machines  around  us,  with  our  young,  rough, 
fresh  nations  in  the  act  of  starting  a  great  civilization  once 
more  on  this  old  and  gentle  earth,  and  I  can  only  say  that  po- 
etry (though  it  be  new,  or  different,  or  even  a  little  terrible)  is 
the  one  thing  that  now,  or  in  any  other  age,  men  begin  great 
civilizations  with. 


I  have  tried  to  express  the  spirit  of  what  Morgan's  genius 
seized  unconsciously  by  the  grim,  resistless  will  of  his  age,  has 
wrought  into  his  career. 

But  in  the  background  of  my  mind  as  I  see  Pierpont  Morgan, 
there  is  always  the  man  who  will  take  his  place,  and  if  I  did  not 
see  the  man  coming,  and  coming  rapidly,  who  is  to  take  JVIr. 
Morgan's  place,  I  admit  that  Mr.  Morgan  himself  would  be  a 
failure,  a  disaster,  a  closed  wall  at  the  end  of  the  world. 

No  one  man  will  take  Mr.  Morgan's  place,  but  the  typical 
man  in  the  group  of  men  that  will  take  his  place  will  justify  Mr. 
Morgan's  work,  by  taking  this  world  in  his  hand  and  riveting 
his  vision  on  where  Morgan's  vision  leaves  off.  As  Morgan 
has  fused  railroads,  iron,  coal,  steamships,  seas,  and  cities,  the 
next  industrial  genius  shall  fuse  the  spirits  and  the  wills  of  men. 
The  Individualists  and  the  Socialists,  the  aristocracies  and 
democracies,  the  capitalists  and  the  labourers  shall  be  welded 
together,  shall  be  fused  and  transfused  by  the  next  Morgan 
into  their  ultimate,  inevitable,  inextricable,  mutual  interests. 

The  chief  characteristic  of  the  new  industrial  leader  is  coming 
to  be  social  imagination  or  the  power  of  seeing  the  larger  in- 
dustrial values  in  human  gifts  and  eflficiencies,  the  more  human 
and  intellectual  energies  of  workmen,  the  market  value  of  their 
spirits,  their  imaginations,  and  their  good- will.  The  underpin- 
ning and  Morganizing  work  has  been  done;  the  power  of  in- 
stant decision  which  Mr.  Morgan  has  had,  has  been  very  often 
based  on  a  lack  of  imagination  about  the  things  that  got  in  his 


312  CROWDS 

way;  but  the  things  that  get  in  the  way  now,  the  big,  little- 
looking  things  —  are  the  things  on  which  the  new  and  inspired 
millionaires'  imagination  will  find  its  skill  and  accumulate  its 
power.  It  is  men's  spirits  that  are  now  in  the  way;  they  have 
been  piling  up  and  accumulating  under  Morgan's  regime  long 
enough,  and  it  is  now  their  turn.  Perhaps  men's  spirits  have 
always  been  beyond  Mr.  Morgan,  and  perhaps  his  imagination 
has  been  worked  largely  as  a  kind  of  cerebellum  imagination :  it 
is  a  kind  of  imagination  that  sees  related  and  articulated  the 
physical  body  of  things,  the  grip  on  the  material  tools,  on 
the  gigantic  limbs  of  a  world.  The  man  who  succeeds  Mr. 
Morgan,  and  for  whom  Mr.  Morgan  has  made  the  world  ready, 
is  the  man  who  has  his  imagination  in  the  upper  part  of  his 
brain,  and  instead  of  doing  things  by  not  seeing,  and  by  not 
being  seen,  he  will  swing  a  light.  He  will  be  himself  in  his  own 
personality,  a  little  of  the  nature  of  a  searchlight,  and  he  will 
work  the  way  a  searchlight  works,  and  will  have  his  will  with 
things  by  seeing  and  lighting, by  X-raying  his  way  through  them 
and  not  by  a  kind  of  colossal  world-butting,  which  is  Morgan's 
way,  both  eyes  imperiously,  implacably  shut,  his  whole  being 
all  bent,  all  crowded  into  his  vast  machine  of  men,  his  huge  will 
lifted  .  .  .  sHid  excavating  blindly,  furiously,  as  through 
some  groping  force  he  knew  not,  great  subcellars  for  a  new 
heaven  and  new  earth. 

The  Crowd  gets  its  heroes  one  at  a  time.  Heroes  are  the 
Crowd's  tools.  Some  are  dredges,  some  are  telescopes.  The 
Crowd,  by  a  kind  of  instinct  —  an  oversoul  or  undersoul  of 
which  it  knows  not  until  afterward,  takes  up  each  tool  grop- 
ingly —  sometimes  even  against  its  will  and  against  its  con- 
science, uses  it  and  drops  it. 

Then  it  sees  why,  suddenly,  it  has  used  it. 

Then  God  hands  it  Another  One. 


CHAPTER  V 
THE  CROWD  AND  TOM  MANN 

I  DROPPED  into  the  London  Opera  House  the  other  night 
to  see  Tom  Mann  (the  EngUsh  Bill  Heywood) ,  another  hero  or 
crowd  spy-glass  that  people  have  taken  up  awhile — thousands 
of  them — to  see  through  to  what  they  really  want.  I  wanted 
to  hear  him  speak,  and  see,  if  I  could,  why  the  crowd  had 
taken  him  up,  and  what  it  was  they  were  seeing  through 
him. 

I  am  apt  to  take  a  dead  set  at  liking  a  man  I  do  not  agree 
with,  if  I  can.  It  gives  one  a  better  start  in  understanding 
him  and  in  not  agreeing  with  him  to  some  purpose. 

But  it  was  not  necessary  to  try  to  like  Tom  Mann  or  to 
make  arrangements  for  being  fair  to  him.  He  came  up  on 
the  platform  (it  was  at  Mr.  Hyndmann's  Socialist  rally)  in 
that  fine  manly  glow  of  his  of  having  just  come  out  of  jail 
(and  a  jail,  whatever  else  may  be  said  about  it,  is  certainly 
a  fine  taking  place  to  come  out  of  —  to  blossom  up  out  of, 
like  a  night-blooming  cereus  before  a  vast,  ligh ted-up,  up- 
roarious audience).  It  is  wonderful  how  becoming  a  jail 
is  to  some  people!  Had  I  not  seen  Mrs.  Pethick  Lawrence 
with  the  flush  of  Old  Bailey  on  her  cheek  only  a  Httle  while 
before  in  Albert  Hall? 

If  Tom  Mann  had  had,  like  Elisha,  that  night,  a  fiery  chariot 
at  his  disposal,  and  had  come  down,  landed  plump  out  of 
heaven  on  his  audience,  he  could  not  have  done  half  as  well 
with  it  as  he  did  with  that  little  gray,  modest,  demure  Salford 
Jail  the  kind  Home  Secretary  gave  him. 

He  tucked  the  jail   under    his  arm,   stood    there   silently 

SIS 


314  CROWDS 

before  us  in  a  blaze  of  light.  Everbody  clapped  for  five 
minutes. 

Then  he  waved  the  air  into  silence  and  began  to  speak. 
I  found  I  had  come  to  hear  a  simple-minded,  thoughtless, 
whole-hearted,  noisy,  self-deceived,  hopelessly  sincere  person. 
He  was  a  mere  huge  pulse  or  muscle  of  a  man.  All  we  could 
do  was  to  watch  him  up  there  on  the  platform  (it  was  all 
so  simple!)  taking  up  the  world  before  everybody  in  his  big 
hands  and  whacking  on  it  with  a  great  rapping  and  sounding 
before  us  all,  as  if  it  were  Tommy's  own  little  drum  mother 
gave  him.  He  stood  there  for  some  fifteen  minutes,  I  should 
think,  making  it — making  the  whole  world  rat-a-tat- tat  to 
his  music,  to  Tommy's  own  music,  as  if  it  were  the  music  of 
the  spheres. 

Mr.  Mann's  gospel  of  hope  for  mankind  seemed  to  be  to 
have  all  the  workers  of  the  world  all  at  once  refuse  to  work. 
Have  the  workers  starve  and  silence  a  planet,  and  take  over 
and  confiscate  the  properties  and  plants  of  capital,  dismiss 
the  employers  of  all  nations  and  run  the  earth  themselves. 


I  sat  in  silence.  The  audience  about  me  broke  out  into 
wild,  happy  appreciation. 

It  acted  as  if  it  had  been  in  the  presence  of  a  vision.  It 
was  as  if,  while  they  sat  there  before  Tom  Mann,  they  had  seen 
being  made,  being  hammered  out  before  them,  a  new  world. 

I  rubbed  my  eyes. 

It  seemed  to  me  precisely  like  the  old  one.  And  all  the 
trouble  for  nothing.  All  the  disaster,  the  proposed  starva- 
tion, and  panic  for  nothing. 

There  was  one  single  possible  difference  in  it. 

We  had  had  before,  Pierpont  Morgan,  the  Tom  Mann  of 
the  banks,  riding  astride  the  planet,  riding  it  out  with  us — 
with  all  the  rest  of  us  helpless  on  it,  holding  on  for  dear  life, 
riding  out  into  the  Blackness. 


THE  CROWD  AND  TOM  MANN  315 

And  now  we  were  having  instead,  Tom  Mann,  the  Pierpont 
Morgan  of  the  Trades  Unions,  riding  astride  the  planet, 
riding  it  out  with  us,  with  all  the  rest  of  us  helpless  on  it, 
holding  on  for  dear  life,  riding  out  into  the  Blackness. 

Of  course  Pierpont  Morgan  and  Tom  Mann  are  both  very 
useful  as  crowd  spy-glasses  for  us  all  to  see  what  we  want 
through. 

But  is  this  what  we  want? 

Is  it  worth  while  to  us,  to  the  crowd,  to  all  classes  of  us, 
to  have  our  world  turned  upside  down  so  that  we  can  be  bul- 
lied on  it  by  one  set  of  men  instead  of  being  bullied  on  it  by 
another.'' 

This  is  the  thing  that  the  Crowd,  as  it  takes  up  one  hero  after 
the  other,  and  looks  at  the  world  through  him,  is  seeing  next. 

Some  of  us  have  seen  sooner  than  the  others.  But  we 
are  nearly  all  of  us  seeing  to-day.  We  have  stood  by  now 
these  many  years  through  strikes  and  rumours  of  strikes, 
and  we  have  watched  the  railway  hold-ups,  the  Lawrence 
Mill  strike,  and  the  great  English  coal  strike.  We  have 
seen,  in  a  kind  of  dumb,  hopeful  astonishment,  everybody 
about  us  piling  into  the  fray,  some  fighting  for  the  rights 
of  labour  and  some  for  the  rights  of  capital,  and  we  have 
kept  wondering  if  possibly  a  little  something  could  not  be 
done  before  long,  possibly  next  year,  in  behalf  of  the  huge, 
battered,  helpless  Public,  that  dear  amorphous  old  ladylike 
Person  doddering  along  the  ^lain  Street  of  the  World,  now 
being  knocked  down  by  one  side  and  now  by  the  other.  It 
has  almost  looked,  some  days,  as  if  both  sides  in  the  quarrel  — 
Capital  and  Labour,  really  thought  that  the  Public  ought 
not  to  expect  to  be  allowed  to  be  out  in  the  streets  at  all. 
Both  sides  in  the  contest  are  so  sure  they  are  right,  and  feel 
so  noble  and  Christian,  that  we  know  they  will  take  care 
of  themselves;  but  the  poor  old  Lady!  —  some  of  us  wonder, 
in  the  turmoil  of  Civilization  and  the  scuffle  of  Christianity, 
what  is  to  become  of  Her. 


316  CROWDS 

Is  it  not  about  time  that  somebody  appeared  very  soon 
now  who  will  make  a  stand  once  and  for  all  in  behalf  of  this 
Dear  Old  Lady-Like  Person? 

Is  it  really  true  that  no  one  has  noticed  Her  and  is  really 
going  to  stand  up  for  Her — for  the  old  gentle-hearted  Planet 
as  a  Whole? 

We  have  our  Tom  Mann  for  the  workers,  and  we  have 
the  Daily  Newspaper  —  the  Tom  Mann  of  Capital,  but  where 
is  our  Tom  Mann  for  Everybody?  \Miere  is  the  man  who 
shall  come  boldly  out  to  Her,  into  the  great  crowded  highway, 
where  the  bullies  of  wealth  have  tripped  up  her  feet,  and 
the  bullies  of  poverty  have  thrown  mud  in  her  face,  where 
all  the  little  mean  herds  or  classes  one  after  the  other  hold 
Her  up  —  the  scorners,  and  haters,  and  cowards,  and  fearers 
for  themselves,  fighting  as  cowards  always  have  to  fight, 
in  herds  ....  where  is  the  man  who  is  going  to  climb 
up  alone  before  the  bullies  of  wealth  and  the  bullies  of  poverty, 
take  his  stand  against  them  all  —  against  both  sides,  and  dare 
them  to  touch  the  dear  helpless  old  Lady  again? 

When  this  man  arises  —  this  Tom  Mann  for  Everybody 
—  whether  he  slips  up  into  immortality  out  of  the  crowd 
at  his  feet,  and  stands  up  against  them  in  overalls  or  in  a 
silk  hat,  he  will  take  his  stand  in  history  as  a  man  beside 
whom  Napoleon  and  Alexander  the  Great  will  look  as  toys 
in  the  childhood  of  the  world. 


We  are  living  in  a  day  when  not  only  all  competent-minded 
students  of  affairs,  but  the  crowd  itself,  the  very  passers-by 
in  the  streets,  have  come  to  see  that  the  very  essence  of 
the  labour  problem  is  the  problem  of  getting  the  classes  to 
work  together.  And  when  the  crowd  watches  the  labour 
leader  and  sees  that  he  is  not  thinking  correctly  and  cannot 
think  correctly  of  the  other  classes,  of  the  consumers  and 
the  employers,   it  drops  him.     Unless  a  leader  has  a  class 


THE  CROWD  AND  TOM  MANN  317 

consciousness  that  is  capable  of  thinking  of  the  other  classes 

—  the  consumers  and  employers,  so  shrewdly  and  so  close 
to  the  facts  that  the  other  classes,  the  consumers  and  the 
employers,  will  be  compelled  to  take  him  seriously,  tolerate 
him,  welcome  him,  and  cooperate  with  him,  the  crowd  has 
come  at  last  to  recognize  promptly  that  he  is  only  of  tempo- 
rary importance  as  a  leader.  He  is  the  by-product  of  one  of 
the  illusions  of  labour.     When  the  illusion  goes  he  goes. 

Capital  has  been  for  some  time  developing  its  class  con- 
sciousness. Labour  has  lately  been  developing  in  a  large 
degree  a  class  consciousness. 

The  most  striking  aspect  of  the  present  moment  is  that 
at  last,  in  the  history  of  the  world,  the  Public  is  developing 
a  class  consciousness. 

The  Crowd  thinks. 

And  as  from  day  to  day  the  Crowd  thinks  —  holds  up  its 
little  class  heroes,  its  Tom  Manns  and  Pierpont  Morgans,  and 
sees  its  world  through  them  —  it  comes  more  and  more  to 
see  implacably  what  it  wants. 

It  has  been  watching  the  Tom  Mann,  or  Bill  Heywood  type 
of  Labour  leader,  for  some  time. 

There  are  certain  general  principles  with  regard  to  labour 
leaders  that  the  crowd  has  come  to  see  by  holding  up  its  heroes 
and  looking  through  them,  at  what  it  wants.  The  first  great 
principle  is  that  no  man  needs  to  be  taken  very  seriously, 
as  a  competent  leader  of  a  great  labour  movement  who  is 
merely  thinking  of  the  interest  of  his  own  class. 

The  second  general  principle  the  Crowd  has  come  to  see, 
Hnd  to  insist  upon  —  when  it  is  appealed  to  (as  it  always  is, 
in  the  long  run)  is  that  no  labour  leader  needs  to  be  taken 
very  seriously  or  regarded  as  very  dangerous  or  very  useful 

—  who  believes  in  force. 

A  labour  leader  who  has  such  a  poor  idea  that  a  hold-up 
is  the  only  way  he  can  express  it  —  the  Crowd  suspects.  The 
only  labour  leaders  that  the  Crowd,  or  people  as  a  whole. 


318  CROWDS 

take  seriously  are  those  that  get  things  by  thinking  and 
by  making  other  people  think. 

The  Crowd  wants  to  think. 

The  Crowd  wants  to  decide. 

And  It  has  decided  to  decide  by  being  made  to  think  and 
not  by  being  knocked  down. 

It  is  not  precisely  because  the  Crowd  is  not  willing  to  be 
knocked  down,  and  has  not  shown  itself  to  be  over  and  over 
again,  when  it  thought  its  being  knocked  down  might  pos- 
sibly help  in  a  just  cause. 

But  it  has  not  been  through  coal  strikes,  Industrial  Workers 
of  the  World,  and  syndicalist  outbreaks  for  nothing. 

It  is  not  the  knocking  down  indulged  in  by  labour  and  by 
capital  that  the  Crowd  fears. 

It  is  the  not-thinking. 

The  Crowd  has  noticed  that  the  knocking-down  disposi- 
tion and  the  not-thinking  disposition  go  together. 

The  Crowd  has  watched  Force  and  Force-people,  and 
has  seen  what  always  happens  after  a  time. 

It  has  come  to  see  that  people  who  have  to  get  things  by 
force  and  not  by  thinking  will  not  be  able  to  think  of  any- 
thing to  do  with  the  things  when  they  get  them. 

So  the  Crowd  does  not  want  them  to  get  them. 

The  Crowd  has  learned  all  this  even  from  the  present  own- 
ers of  things.  It  does  not  want  to  learn  them  all  over  again 
from  new  ones.  The  present  owners  of  things  have  got  them 
half  by  force,  and  that  is  why  they  only  half  understand 
how  to  run  them. 

But  they  do  half  understand  because  they  only  half  be- 
lieve in  force.  The  crowd  has  seen  them  get  their  supremacy 
by  the  use  of  the  employment-hold-up,  or  by  starving  or 
threatening  to  starve  the  workers.  And  now  it  sees  the 
Syndicalist  workers  proposing  to  get  control  by  starving  or 
threatening  to  starve  everybody.  Of  the  two,  those  who 
propose  to  starve  all  the  people  to  get  their  own  way,  and 


THE  CROWD  AND  TOM  MANN  319 

those  who  threaten  to  starve  part  of  the  people,  it  has  seemed 
to  the  Crowd,  naturally,  that  those  who  only  half  believe 
in  starving,  and  who  only  starve  a  part  of  us,  would  be 
likely  to  be  more  intelUgent  as  world-runners. 

In  other  words  (accepting  for  the  sake  of  argument  the 
worst  possible  interpretation  of  the  capitalist  class),  they 
have  spent  several  years  in  learning,  and  have  already  half 
learned  that  force  in  industry  is  ineflBcient  and  cannot  be 
made  to  work. 

Now  when  the  Crowd  sees  the  Syndicalists  swinging  their 
hats  in  a  hundred  nations,  with  one  big  hoarse  hurrah  around 
a  world,  with  five  minutes'  experience,  come  rushing  in,  and 
propose  to  take  up  the  world  —  the  whole  world  in  two  min- 
utes more  and  run  it  in  the  same  old  bygone  way  —  the  way 
that  the  capitalists  are  just  giving  up  —  by  force  —  it  knows 
what  it  thinks. 

It  thinks  it  will  fight  Class  Syndicalism,  It  makes  up 
its  mind  it  will  fight  Class  Syndicalism  with  Crowd  Syndi- 
calism. It  has  decided  that,  in  the  interests  of  all  of  us, 
of  a  crowd  civilization,  of  what  we  call  the  world  or  Crowd 
Syndicate,  its  industries  should  be  controlled,  not  by  the 
owners  and  jiot  by  the  workers,  but  by  those  men,  whoever 
they  are,  who  can  control  them  with  the  most  skill  and 
eflSciency. 

The  Crowd  has  come  to  see  that  the  present  owners  — 
judging  from  current  events,  and  taking  them  as  a  whole, 
and  speaking  impersonally  and  historically  —  have  proved 
themselves,  on  the  whole,  incompetent  to  control  industries 
with  skill  and  efficiency,  because  they  have  treated  labour 
as  the  natural  enemy  of  capital  and  have  quarrelled  with  it. 
It  sees  that  the  present  workers,  acting  as  syndicates  or  other- 
wise, are  incompetent  to  own  and  control  and  manage  in- 
dustry because  they  propose  to  treat  capital  as  the  natural 
enemy  of  the  workers.  There  has  been  but  one  conclusion 
possible.     If  Civilization  or  the  Crowd  Syndicate  has  a  right 


320  CROWDS 

to  have  its  industries  managed  in  the  interests  of  all,  and  if 
the  present  owners  have  proved  themselves  to  be  mentally 
incompetent  to  control  industry  because  thej  fight  labour, 
and  if  the  present  labourers  as  a  class  have  proved  themselves 
to  be  mentally  incompetent  because  they  propose  to  fight 
capital,  there  is  naturally  but  one  question  the  crowd  syndi- 
cate is  asking  to-day,  namely,  "Are  there  any  mentally  com- 
petent business  firms  at  all  in  the  world,  any  firms  whose  owners 
and  labourers  have  thought  out  a  way  of  not  fighting  ? "  From 
the  point  of  view  of  the  Crowd,  the  men  who  are  competent, 
who  know  how  to  do  their  work,  do  not  have  to  lay  down 
their  tools  and  find  out  all  over  again  how  to  do  their  work. 
They  know  it  and  keep  doing  it. 

So  the  Crowd  keeps  coming  back  with  the  question,  "Are 
there  or  are  there  not  any  competent  business  establishments 
in  our  modern  life?  Which  are  they,  and  where  are  they?" 
We  want  to  know  about  them.  We  want  to  study  them. 
We  want  to  focus  the  thought  of  the  world  on  them  and  see 
how  they  do  it. 

The  answering  of  this  question  is  what  the  next  Pierpont 
Morgan  and  the  next  Tom  Mann  are  for. 

What  the  next  Pierpont  Morgan  is  for  is  to,  find  out  for 
•us  who  the  competent  employers  are — the  employers  who 
can  get  twice  as  much  work  out  of  their  labour  as  other  em- 
ployers do — recognize  them,  stand  by  them  and  put  up  money 
on  them.  The  next  Pierpont  Morgan  will  find  out  also  who 
the  incompetent  employers  are,  recognize  them,  stand  out 
against  them,  and  unless  they  have  brains  enough  or  can 
get  brains  enough  to  cooperate  with  their  own  workmen, 
refuse  to  lend  money  to  them. 

This  would  make  a  banker  a  statesman,  would  make  bank- 
ing a  great  and  creative  profession,  shaping  the  destinies  of 
civilizations,  determining  with  coins  back  and  forth  over 
a  counter  the  prayers  and  the  songs,  the  very  religions  of 
nations,  and  swinging  like  a  pendulum  the  fate  of  the  world. 


THE  CROWD  AND  TOM  MANN  321 

The  first  Pierpont  Morgan  has  made  himself,  in  a  necessary 
transitional  movement,  a  hero  in  the  business  world  because 
of  a  certain  moral  energy  there  is  in  him.  He  has  insisted 
in  expressing  his  own  character  in  business.  He  would  not 
lend  money  to  capitalists  fighting  capitalists,  and  in  a  general 
way  he  has  compelled  capitalists  to  cooperate.  The  new 
hero  of  the  business  world  is  going  to  compel  capital  not 
merely  to  cooperate  with  capital,  but  to  cooperate  with 
labour  and  with  the  public.  And  as  Morgan  compelled 
the  railroads  of  the  United  States  to  cooperate  with  one 
another  by  getting  money  for  those  that  showed  the  most 
genius  for  cooperation,  and  by  not  getting  money  for  rail- 
roads that  showed  less  genius  for  it,  so  the  next  Pierpont 
Morgan  will  throw  the  weight  of  his  capital  at  critical  times 
in  favour  of  companies  that  show  the  largest  genius  for  build- 
ing the  mutual  interests  of  capitalists,  employees,  and  the 
public  inextricably  into  one  body.  He  is  going  to  recognize 
as  a  banker  that  the  most  permanent,  long-headed,  practical, 
and  competent  employers  are  those  whose  business  genius 
is  essentially  social  genius,  the  genius  for  being  human,  for 
discovering  the  mutual  interests  of  men,  and  for  making 
human  machinery  work. 

There  is  a  great  position  ahead  for  this  hero  when  he  comes. 
And  I  have  seen  in  my  mind  to-day  thousands  of  men,  young 
and  old  in  every  business,  in  every  country  of  the  world, 
pressing  forward  to  get  the  place. 

It  is  what  the  next  Tom  Mann  is  for  —  to  find  out  for  the 
Trades  Unions  and  for  the  public  who  the  most  competent 
workmen  are  in  every  line  of  business,  the  workmen  who 
are  the  least  mechanical-minded,  who  have  shown  the  most 
brains  in  educating  and  being  educated  by  their  employers, 
the  most  power  in  touching  the  imaginations  of  their  em- 
ployers with  their  lives  and  with  their  work,  and  in  coopera- 
ing  with  them. 

When  the  next  Tom  Mann  has  searched  out  and  found 


322  CROWDS 

the  workmen  in  every  line  of  business  who  are  capable 
of  working  with  their  superiors,  and  of  becoming  more  and 
more  like  them,  he  will  make  known  to  all  other  workmen 
and  to  all  other  Trades  Unions  who  these  workmen  are,  and 
how  they  have  managed  to  do  it.  He  will  see  that  all  Trades 
Unions  are  informed,  in  night-schools  and  otherwise,  how 
they  have  done  it.  He  will  see  that  the  principles,  motives, 
and  conditions  that  these  men  have  employed  in  making 
themselves  more  like  their  superiors,  in  making  themselves 
more  and  more  fit  to  take  the  place  of  their  superiors,  in  mak- 
ing their  work  a  daily,  creative,  spirited  part  of  a  great  busi- 
ness, are  made  so  familiar  to  all  Trades  Unions  that  the  policies 
of  all  our  labour  organizations  everywhere  shall  change  and 
shall  be  infected  with  a  new  spirit;  and  labouring  men,  instead 
of  going  to  their  shops  the  world  over,  to  spend  nine  hours 
a  day  in  fighting  the  business  in  which  they  are  engaged, 
to  spend  nine  hours  a  day  in  trying  to  get  themselves  nothing 
to  do,  nine  hours  a  day  in  getting  nobody  to  want  to  employ 
them,  will  work  the  way  they  would  Hke  to  work,  and  the 
way  they  would  all  work  to-morrow  morning  if  they  knew 
the  things  about  capital  and  about  labour  that  they  have 
a  right  to  know,  and  that  only  incompetent  employers  and 
incompetent  labor  leaders  year  by  year  have  kept  them  from 
knowing. 


CHAPTER  VI 
AN  OPENING  FOR  THE  NEXT  PIERPONT  MORGAN 

CHRIST  said  once,  "He  that  is  greatest  among  you  let 
him  be  your  servant." 

Most  people  have  taken  it  as  if  He  had  said  : 

"He  that  is  greatest  among  you  let  him  be  your  valet. 

"He  that  is  greatest  among  you  let  him  be  your  butler. 

"He  that  is  greatest  among  you  let  him  be  your  hostler, 
porter,  footman." 

They  cling  to  a  mediaeval  Morality-Play,  Servant-in- 
the-House  idea,  a  kind  of  head-waiter  idea  of  what  Christ 
meant. 

This  seems  to  some  of  us  a  hteral-minded.  Western  way 
of  interpreting  an  Oriental  metaphor.  We  do  not  believe 
that  Christ  meant  servanthood.  It  seems  to  us  that  He 
meant  something  deeper,  that  He  meant  service;  that  He 
might  have  said  as  well: 

"He  that  is  greatest  among  you  let  him  be  your  Duke 
of  Wellington. 

"He  that  is  greatest  among  you  let  him  be  your  Lincoln. 

"He  that  is  greatest  among  you  let  him  be  your  Edison, 
your  Marconi." 

At  all  events,  it  is  extremely  unlikely  that  He  meant  look- 
ing and  acting  like  a  servant. 

He  meant  really  being  one,  whether  one  looked  like  a  ser- 
vant or  not.  If  looking  independent  and  being  independent 
makes  the  service  better,  if  defying  the  appearance  of  a  ser- 
vant makes  the  service  more  efficient,  we  believe  the  appear- 
ance should  be  defied. 

823 


324  CROWDS 

It  troubles  us  when  we  see  the  Czar  of  Russia  in  the  pres- 
ence of  the  civiUzed  world,  once  a  year  taking  such  great 
pains  to  look  like  a  servant  and  to  wash  his  peasants'  feet. 

We  are  not  willing,  if  we  ever  have  any  relations  with  the 
public,  to  be  Czars  and  look  like  servants. 

We  would  prefer  to  look  like  czars  and  be  servants. 

We  are  inclined  to  believe  that  no  man  who  is  rendering 
his  utmost  service  to  the  crowd  ever  thinks  in  the  ordinary 
servant  sense  of  being  obedient  to  it.  He  is  thinking  of  his 
service,  and  of  its  being  the  most  high  and  perfect  and  most 
complete  thing  that  he  can  render — the  thing  that  he,  out  of 
all  men,  could  think  of  and  do,  and  that  the  crowd  would 
want  him  to  do.  He  is  busy  in  being  obedient  to  the  crowd, 
in  fulfilling  daily  its  spirit,  and  not  in  taking  orders  from  it. 

The  reason  that  the  larger  number  of  men  who  go  into 
politics  to-day  are  inefficient  and  do  not  get  the  things  done 
that  crowds  want,  is  that  they  are  the  kind  of  men  who  feel 
that  they  must  talk  and  act  like  servants.  Even  the  most 
independent-looking  and  efficient  men,  who  look  as  if  they 
really  saw  something  and  had  something  to  give,  often  prove 
disappointing.  When  one  comes  to  know  a  man  of  this  type 
more  intimately,  one  is  apt  to  find  that  he  is  really  a  flunkey 
in  his  thoughts;  that  he  feels  hired  in  his  mind;  that  he  is 
the  valet  of  a  crowd,  and  often,  too,  the  valet  of  some  partic- 
ular crowd  —  some  little,  safe,  shut-in  crowd,  party,  or  special 
interest  that  wants  to  own,  or  to  keep,  or  to  take  away  a  world. 

Whichever  way  to-day  one  looks,  one  finds  this  illusion 
as  to  what  a  public  servant  really  is,  for  the  moment,  cor- 
rupting our  public  life. 

But  Christ  did  not  say,  "He  that  is  greatest  among  you, 
let  him  be  your  valet." 

The  man  who  is  greatest  among  us,  neither  in  this  age 
nor  in  any  other,  ever  will  or  ever  can  be  a  valet.  He  faces 
the  crowd  the  way  Christ  did  —  with  his  life,  with  his  soul, 
with  his  God. 


AN  OPENING  FOR  THE  NEXT  MORGAN      325 

He  will  not  be  afraid  of  the  Crowd.     .     .     . 

He  will  be  the  Greatest,  he  will  be  a  Servant. 

In  the  meantime — in  the  hour  of  the  valets,  only  the  little 
crowds,  speak.     The  People  wait. 

The  Crowd  is  dumb,  massive,  and  silent.  There  seems 
to  be  no  one  in  the  world  to  express  it,  to  express  its  indom- 
itable desire,  its  prayer,  to  lay  at  last  its  huge,  terrible,  beauti- 
ful will  upon  the  earth. 

It  is  the  classes  or  little  crowds — the  little  pulling  and 
pushing,  helpless,  lonely,  mean,  separated  crowds — blind, 
hateful,  and  afraid,  who  are  running  about  trying  to  lay  their 
little  wills  upon  the  earth. 

The  Crowd  waits  and  is  not  afraid. 

The  little,  separated  crowds  are  afraid. 

The  world,  for  the  moment,  is  being  interpreted,  expressed, 
and  managed  by  People  Who  Are  Afraid. 

It  is  the  same  in  all  the  nations.  In  the  coal  strike  in 
England  one  finds  the  miners  in  the  trades  unions  afraid 
to  vote  except  in  secret  because  they  are  afraid  of  one  another. 
One  finds  the  miners'  leaders  afraid  of  the  men  under  them  and 
of  what  they  might  do,  so  that  they  have  no  policy  except  to 
fight.  One  finds  the  miners'  leaders  afraid  of  the  mine-man- 
agers and  of  what  they  might  do,  so  that  they  have  no  policy 
except  to  fight.  One  finds  the  mine-managers  afraid  of  one 
another,  afraid  of  their  stockholders,  afraid  of  the  miners' 
leaders,  and  afraid  of  the  newspapers  and  afraid  of  the  Gov- 
ernment. 

One  finds  the  Government  afraid  of  everybody. 

Everybody  is  afraid  of  the  Government. 

Everybody  fights  because  everybody  is  afraid. 

And  everybody  is  afraid  because  everybody  sees  that  it 
is  mere  crowds  that  are  running  the  world. 

There  is  another  reason  why  everybody  is  afraid.  Every- 
body is  afraid  because  everybody  is  shut  in  with  some  little 
separated  crowd. 


326  CROWDS 

People  who  are  never  Outside,  who  only  see  a  little  way  out 
over  the  edge  of  the  little  crowd  in  which  they  are  penned 
up,  are  naturally  afraid. 

A  world  that  is  run  by  little  shut-in  crowds  is  necessarily  a 
world  that  is  run  by  People  Who  Are  Afraid. 

And  so  now  we  have  come  to  the  fulness  of  the  time.  The 
cities  and  the  nations,  the  prairies,  and  the  seas  and  the  mines, 
the  very  skies  about  us  can  be  seen  by  all  to-day  to  be  full  of 
a  dull  groping  and  of  a  great  asking,  "Who  Are  The  Men 
Who  Are  not  Afraid?  " 

The  moment  these  men  appear  who  are  not  afraid,  and 
it  is  seen  by  all  that  they  are  not  afraid,  the  world  (and  all 
the  little  blind,  helpless  crowds  in  it)  will  be  placed  in  their  hands. 


CHAPTER  VII 
AN  OPENING  FOR  THE  NEXT  TOM  MANN 

I  AM  aware  that  Tom  Mann  is  not  a  world  figure.  But 
he  is  a  world  type.  And  as  the  editor  of  the  Syndicalist,  the 
leader  of  the  most  imposing  and  revealing  labour  rally  the 
world  has  seen,  he  is  of  universal  interest.  Those  of  us  who 
believe  in  crowds  are  deeply  interested  in  finding,  recognizing, 
creating,  and  in  seeing  set  free  out  of  the  ranks  of  men  the  labour 
leaders  who  shall  express  the  nobility  and  dignity  of  modern 
labour,  who  shall  express  the  bigness  of  spirit,  the  brawny- 
heartedness,  the  composure,  the  common-sense,  the  patriotism, 
the  faithfulness  and  courage  of  the  People. 

I  indict  Tom  Mann  before  the  bar  of  the  world  as  not  express- 
ing the  will  and  the  spirit  of  the  People. 

I  do  this  as  a  labouring  man.  I  decline,  because  I  spend 
my  time  daily  tracing  out  little  crooked  lines  on  paper  with  a 
j)en,  because  I  have  wrought  day  and  night  to  make  little 
patterns  of  ink  and  little  stretches  of  words  reach  men  together 
round  a  world,  because  I  have  sweat  blood  to  beheve,  because  in 
weariness  and  sorrow  I  have  wrought  out  at  last  my  little  faith 
for  a  world  ...  I  decline  not  to  be  numbered  with  the 
labourers  I  see  in  the  streets.  I  claim  my  right  before  all  men 
this  day,  with  my  unbent  body  and  with  my  unsoiled  hands, 
to  be  enrolled  among  the  toilers  of  the  earth. 

I  speak  as  a  labouring  man.  I  say  Tom  Mann  is  incompetent 
as  a  true  leader  of  Labour. 

The  first  reason  that  he  is  incompetent  is  that  he  does  not 
observe  facts.  He  merely  observes  facts  that  everybody  can 
see,  that  everybody  has  seen  for  years.     He  does  not  observe 

327 


328  CROWDS 

the  new  and  exceptional  facts  about  capital  that  only  a  few 
can  see,  the  seeing  of  which,  and  the  seeing  of  which  first, 
should  alone  ever  constitute  a  man  a  true  leader  in  dealing 
with  capital.  He  merely  believes  facts  that  nearly  everybody 
has  caught  up  to  believing  —  facts  about  human  nature,  about 
what  works  in  business.  The  crowd  is  not  content  with  this. 
It  has  become  accustomed  to  seeing  that  the  men  who  lead  in 
business,  and  who  make  others  follow  them,  whether  masters 
or  workmen,  are  men  who  do  it  by  observing  certain  new  and 
exceptional  facts  and  acting  upon  them.  If  these  men  can- 
not observe  them,  we  have  seen  them  create  them.  It  is 
the  men  who  make  new  things  true  wherever  they  go 
that  the  crowd  is  coming  to  recognize  and  to  take  seri- 
ously and  permanently  as  the  real  leaders  of  Labour  and  of 
Capital  to-day.  Tom  Mann  is  incompetent  as  a  labour 
leader  in  dealing  with  capital  to-day,  because  the  things 
that  he  proposes  to  do  all  turn  on  three  points  which,  looked 
at  on  the  outside,  merely  have  or  might  be  said  to  have  a 
true  look: 

First,  employers  are  all  alike; 

Second,  none  of  them  ever  work; 

Third,  they  are  all  the  enemies  of  Labour. 

Tom  Mann  is  incompetent  to  grapple  with  Capital  in  behalf 
of  Labour  as  any  great  labour  leader  would  have  to  do,  because 
he  has  his  facts  wrong  about  Capital,  is  simple-minded  and 
rudimentary  and  undiscriminating  about  the  men  with  whom 
he  deals,  and  sees  them  all  alike. 

This  is  a  poor  beginning  even  for  fighting  with  them. 

The  second  reason  that  Tom  Mann  is  incompetent  is,  not 
that  he  has  his  facts  wrong  and  does  not  think,  but  that  he  car- 
ries not-thinking  about  the  employing  class  still  further,  has 
come  to  make  a  kind  of  religion  out  of  not-thinking  about  them. 
And  instead  of  thinking  how  to  make  labouring  men  think 
better  than  their  employers  think,  and  making  them  think  so 
well  that  they  can  crowd  their  way  into  their  employers'  places. 


AN  OPENING  FOR  THE  NEXT  TOM  MANN  329 

"ne  proposes  to  have  labour  get  into  their  places  without  think- 
ing, and  run  a  world  without  thinking.  All  that  is  necessary 
in  order  to  have  workmen  run  the  world,  is  to  get  workmen  to 
stop  working,  to  stop  thinking,  and  then  as  rapidly  as  possible 
to  get  everybody  else  to  stop  thinking.  Then  the  world  will 
fall  into  their  hands. 

The  third  reason  that  Tom  Mann  is  incompetent  is  that  he 
is  unpractical  and  full  of  scorn.  And  scorn,  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  practical-minded  man,  is  a  sentimental  and  use- 
less emotion.  We  have  learned  that  it  almost  always  has  to 
be  used  by  a  man  who  has  his  facts  wrong,  that  is,  who  does 
not  see  what  he  himself  is  really  like,  and  who  has  not  noticed 
what  other  people  are  really  like.  No  man  who  sees  himself 
as  he  is,  feels  at  liberty  to  use  scorn.  And  no  man  who  sees 
others  as  they  are,  sees  any  occasion  for  it.  Tom  Mann  uses 
hate  also,  and  hate  has  been  found  to  be,  as  directed  toward 
classes  of  persons  as  a  means  of  getting  them  to  do  things, 
archaic  and  inefficient.  It  is  not  quite  bright.  It  need  not 
be  denied  that  hate  and  scorn  both  impress  some  people,  but 
they  never  seem  to  impress  the  people  that  see  things  to 
do  and  who  find  ways  to  do  them.  And  the  people  who  use 
scorn  are  all  too  narrow,  too  class-bound,  and  too  self-re- 
garding to  do  things  in  a  huge  world  problem  like  the  present 
one. 

The  fourth  reason  that  Tom  Mann  as  a  labour  leader  is 
incompetent  is  that  he  is  afraid;  he  is  afraid  of  capital,  so 
afraid  that  he  has  to  fight  it  instead  of  grappling  with  it  and 
cooperating  with  it.  He  is  afraid  to  believe  in  labour  —  so 
afraid  that  he  takes  orders  from  it  instead  of  seeing  for  it,  and 
seeing  ahead  for  it.  He  is  afraid  of  his  employers'  brains,  of 
their  having  brains  enough  to  understand  and  to  to  be  convinced 
as  to  the  position  of  the  labourer.  He  is  afraid  to  believe  in 
his  own  brains,  in  his  own  brains  being  good  enough  to  con- 
vince them. 

So  he  backs  down  and  fights. 


330  CROWDS 

If  any  reader  who  is  interested  to  do  so  will  kindly  turn 
back  at  this  point  a  page  or  so,  and  read  this  chapter  we 
have  just  gone  through  together,  over  again,  and  if  he  will 
kindly,  wherever  it  occurs,  insert  for  Tom  Mann,  labour  leader, 
"D.  A.  Thomas,  leader  of  mine-owners,"  he  will  save  much 
time  for  both  of  us,  and  he  will  kindly  make  one  chapter  in  this 
book  which  is  already  much  too  long,  as  good  as  two. 

Tom  Mann  (unless  he  is  changed)  is  about  to  be  dropped 
as  a  typical  modern  leader  of  Labour  because  he  is  afraid,  and 
what  he  expresses  in  the  labouring  class  is  its  fear  of  Capital. 

And  what  D.  A.  Thomas  expresses  for  Capital  is  its  fear  of 
Labour. 

There  are  thousands  of  capitalists  and  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  labour  men  who  have  something  better  they  want  expressed 
by  their  leaders,  than  their  Fear. 

Out  of  these  men  the  new  leaders  will  be  chosen. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  MEN  WHO  LOOK 

DURING  the  recent  coal  strike  in  England,  as  at  all  times 
in  the  world,  heroes  abounded. 

The  trouble  with  most  of  us  during  the  coal  strike  was  not 
in  our  not  having  heroes,  but  in  our  not  being  quite  sure  which 
they  were. 

Davy  McEwen,  a  miner  who  stood  out  against  the  whole 
countryside,  and  went  to  his  work  every  day  in  defiance  of 
thousands  of  men  on  the  hills  about  him  trying  to  stop  him, 
and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  men  all  over  England  trying  to 
scare  him,  was  not  a  hero  to  Mr.  Josiah  Wedge  wood.  Mr. 
Josiah  Wedgewood  one  day  in  the  height  of  the  conflict,  from 
his  seat  in  the  House  of  Commons,  rose  in  his  might — and 
before  the  face  of  the  nation  called  Davy  McEwen  a  traitor 
to  his  class. 

Sir  Arthur  Markham,  one  of  the  largest  of  the  mine-owners, 
in  the  height  of  the  conflict  between  the  mine-owners  and  the 
miners  over  wages,  rose  in  the  House  and  declared  that,  in  his 
opinion  as  a  mine-owner,  the  mine-owners  were  wrong  and  the 
miners  were  right,  and  that  the  mine-owners  could  afford  to 
pay  better  wages,  and  should  yield  to  the  men. 

He  was  called  a  traitor  to  his  class. 

At  the  last  moment  in  the  coal  strike,  when  the  Government 
had  done  its  best,  and  when  the  labour  leaders  still  proposed  to 
hold  up  England  and  defy  the  Government  until  they  got  their 
way,  Stephen  Walsh,  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  miners,  stood  up 
in  the  face  of  a  million  miners  and  said  he  would  not  go  on  with 
the  others  against  the  Government.     "It  is  now  time  for  the 

331 


S32  CROWDS 

trades  union  men  to  return  to  work.  We  have  done  what  we 
could.  Our  citizenship  should  be  higher  than  our  trades  union- 
ship,  and  with  me,  as  long  as  I  am  a  trades  union  man,  it  will 
be." 

He  was  called  a  traitor  to  his  class. 

I  am  an  unwilling  and  unfit  person,  as  a  sojourner  and  an 
American,  to  take  any  position  on  the  merits  of  the  question 
as  to  the  disestablishment  of  the  Church  in  Wales.  But  when 
I  saw  Bishop  Gore  standing  up  and  looking  unblinkingly  at 
facts  or  what  he  thought  were  facts  which  he  would  rather  not 
have  seen  and  which  were  not  on  his  side,  and  when  I  saw  him 
voting  deliberately  for  the  disestablishment  of  his  own  Church, 
I  greeted  with  joy,  as  if  I  had  seen  a  cathedral,  another  traitor 
to  his  class.  I  almost  believe  that  a  Church  that  could  produce 
and  supply  a  man  like  this  for  a  great  nation  looking  through 
every  city  and  county  year  by  year  for  men  to  go  with  it  .  .  . 
a  Church  that  could  produce  and  keep  producing  Bishop  Gores, 
would  be  entitled,  from  a  great  nation  to  anything  it  liked. 


Men  seem  to  be  capable  of  three  stages  of  courage.  Courage 
is  graded  to  the  man. 

There  is  the  man  who  is  so  tired,  or  mechanical-minded,  that 
he  can  only  think  of  himself. 

There  is  the  man  who  is  so  tired  that  he  can  onjly  think  of 
his  class. 

And  there  is  the  man  that  one  has  watched  being  moved 
o\^er  slowly  from  a  Me-man  into  a  Class-man,  who  has  begun  to 
show  the  first  faint  beginnings  of  being  a  Crowd-man. 

One  man  has  courage  for  himself  because  he  knows  what  he 
wants  for  himself.  Another  has  courage  for  his  class  because 
he  knows  what  he  wants  for  his  class.  Another  has  courage 
for  God  and  for  the  world  because  there  are  things  he  sees  that 
he  wants  for  God  and  for  the  world,  and  he  sees  them  so  clearly 
that  he  sees  ways  to  get  them. 


THE  MEN  WHO  LOOK  333 

I^ack  of  courage  is  a  lack  of  vision  or  clear-headedness  about 
what  one  wants.  I  do  not  know,  but  I  can  only  say  that  it 
has  seemed  to  me  that  Bishop  Gore  has  a  vision  or  clear-headed- 
ness about  what  he  wants  for  democracy,  and  that  he  uses  his 
vision  of  what  he  wants  for  democracy  to  true  his  vision  for  his 
class.  Perhaps  also  he  has  a  vision  for  his  class,  for  the  church 
people,  that  it  is  for  the  interests  of  church  people  as  a  class  to  be 
the  one  class,  out  of  all  the  world,  that  is  supremely  considerate, 
big,  leisurely,  and  unfretful  in  its  dealings  with  others  Perhaps 
also  he  has  a  vision  for  himself  and  is  clear-headed  for  himself,  and 
has  seen  that  though  the  steeples  fall  about  him,  and  though 
the  altars  go  up  in  smoke,  he  will  keep  the  spirit  of  God  still 
within  his  reach.  The  gentleness,  the  grim  hope  for  the  world 
and  the  patience  that  built  the  cathedrals,  shall  be  in  his 
heart  day  and  night. 

I  hold  no  brief  for  Bishop  Gore. 

I  know  there  must  be  others  like  him  who  voted  on  the  other 
side. 

I  know  there  are  hundreds  of  thousands  of  employers  who  in 
their  hearts  are  like  him.  I  know  there  are  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  men  in  the  trades  unions  who  are  like  him. 

I  am  not  sure  that  Bishop  Gore,  on  the  merits  of  the  case, 
was  right.  I  wish  this  day  I  knew  that  he  was  wrong.  I  wish 
that  I  had  spent  the  last  six  months  in  fighting  him,  in  fighting 
against  his  vision,  that  I  might  be  more  free  to-day  to  point 
to  him  with  joy  when  I  go  up  and  down  the  streets  with  men 
and  look  at  the  churches  with  men  —  the  rows  of  churches  — 
and  try  to  tell  them  what  they  are  for.  I  have  seen  that  the 
cathedrals  scattered  about  under  the  sky  in  England  are  but 
God's  little  tools  to  make  great  cities  on  the  earth,  and  to  build 
softly  out  of  the  hearts  of  men  and  women  men  who  shall  be 
cathedrals  too  —  men  buttressed  against  the  world,  men  who 
can  stand  alone. 

And  it  has  seemed  to  me  that  Tom  Mann  and  D.  A.  Thomas 
b,fe  incompetent  as  leaders  of  industry  because  they  do  not 


334  CROWDS 

see  that  Labour  is  full  of  men  who  can  do  things  like  this.  I 
am  proud,  over  in  my  country  across  the  sea,  to  be  cousin  to 
a  nation  that  is  still  the  headquarters  —  the  international 
citadel  —  of  individualism  upon  the  earth.  The  world  knows 
if  England  does  not,  that  this  kind  of  individualism  is  the  most 
characteristic,  the  most  mighty  and  impregnable  Dreadnought 
that  England  has  produced. 

But  England  knows  it  too. 

I  have  seen  thousands  of  men  in  England  in  their  dull  brown 
clothes  pass  by  me  in  the  street  who  know  and  respond  to  the 
spirit  that  is  in  Bishop  Gore,  and  who  have  the  courage  to  show 
it  themselves.  And  the  vision  is  in  them,  but  it  is  not  waked. 
The  moment  it  is  waked  we  will  have  a  new  world.  It  is  be- 
cause Tom  Mann  and  D.  A.  Thomas  are  not  leaders  of  men 
who  have  this  spirit  that  they  are  about  to  be  dropped  as  typi- 
cal leaders  of  Labour  and  Capital  in  modern  times.  No  man 
will  be  accepted  by  the  Crowd  to-day  as  a  competent  leader  of 
his  class  who  is  afraid  of  the  other  classes.  No  man  will  be 
said  to  be  a  true  leader,  to  be  competent  to  make  things  move 
in  the  world,  who  does  not  have  three  gears  of  courage :  courage 
for  himself,  courage  for  his  own  people,  courage  for  other  people; 
and  who  does  not  dare  to  deal  with  other  people  as  if  they  really 
might  be  dealt  with,  after  all,  as  fellow  human  beings  capable 
of  acting  like  fellow  human  beings,  capable  of  finer  and  of 
truer  things,  of  more  manly  and  patient,  more  shrewdly  gener- 
ous, more  far-sighted  things,  than  might  appear  at  first. 


Was  Mr.  Josiah  Wedgewood  right  when  he  called  Davy 
McEwen  a  traitor  to  his  class? 

I  do  not  want  to  judge  Davy  McEwen.  Such  things  are 
matters  of  personal  interpretation,  and  of  standing  with  a  man 
face  to  face  for  a  moment  and  looking  him  in  the  eyes. 

Of  course,  if  I  had  done  this,  I  might  have  been  tempted 
and  despised  him. 


THE  MEN  WHO  LOOK  335 

And  I  might  now.  The  thing  that  I  would  have  tried  to 
look  down  through  to  in  him,  if  I  had  looked  him  in  the  eye, 
would  have  been  something  like  this :  "Are  you  or  are  you  not, 
Davy  McEwen,  standing  out  day  after  day  against  your  class 
because  you  can  see  less  than  your  class  sees,  because  you  are 
a  mere  me-man?  Do  you  go  by  here  grimly  day  by  day,  past 
all  these  people  lined  up  on  the  hills,  sternly  thinking  of  your- 
self?" 

If  I  found  that  this  was  true,  as  it  might  well  be,  and  often 
is,  I  would  say  that  Davy  McEwen  was  a  traitor  to  his  class. 
But  if  I  found  Davy  McEwen  going  past  hills-ful  of  workmen 
because  he  had  a  larger,  fairer  vision  of  what  his  class  is  than 
they  had,  if  it  proved  to  be  true  that  the  crowd-man  in  him  was 
keeping  the  class-man  in  place,  and  holding  true  his  vision  for 
his  class,  I  would  say  that  it  was  his  class  that  was  being  a 
traitor  to  him;  I  would  say  that  sooner  or  later  his  class  would 
see  in  some  quiet  day  that  it  had  been  a  traitor  to  him  and  to 
the  world,  and  a  traitor  to  itself. 


If  socialism  and  individualism  cannot  work  together,  and  if 
(like  the  masculine  and  feminine  in  spirit)  each  cannot  make 
itself  the  means  and  the  method  of  fulfilling  the  other,  there 
is  no  reason  why  either  of  them  should  be  fulfilled. 

In  the  meantime,  there  is  a  kind  of  self-will  that  seems  to 
me,  as  its  shadow  comes  across  my  path,  like  God  himself 
walking  on  the  earth.  And  I  have  seen  it  in  the  rich  and  I 
have  seen  it  in  the  poor,  and  in  people  who  were  being  wrong 
and  in  people  who  were  being  right. 

It  is  like  hearing  great  bells  in  the  dark,  singing  in  the  solemn 
night  to  so  much  as  hear  of  a  man  somewhere,  I  might  go  and 
see,  who  stands  alone. 

If  we  want  to  stand  together,  let  us  begin  with  these  men 
who  can  stand  alone. 

There  is  a  sense  in  which  Christ  died  on  the  cross  because 


336  CROWDS 

He  could  find  at  the  time  no  other  way  of  saying  this.  There 
is  a  sense  in  which  the  dechne  of  individualism  is  what  he  died 
for. 

Or  we  might  call  it  the  beginning  of  individualism.  He  died 
for  the  principle  of  doing  what  he  thought  was  right  before 
anybody  else  did  it,  and  whether  anybody  else  did  it  or  not. 
The  self-will  of  Jesus  was  half  the  New  Testament.  He  cruci- 
fied himself,  his  mother,  and  a  dozen  disciples  that  His  own 
vision  for  all  might  be  fulfilled.  Socialism  itself,  what  is  good 
in  it,  would  not  exist  to-day  if  Jesus,  the  Christ,  had  not  prac- 
tised socialism,  in  the  best  sense,  by    being  an    individualist. 

If  we  are  going  to  get  to  socialism  by  giving  up  individualism, 
by  abolishing  heroes,  why  get  to  it.'' 

This  more  glorious  self-will  is  not,  of  course,  of  a  kind  that 
all  men  can  expect  to  have.  Most  of  us  have  not  th^  vision 
that  equips  us,  and  that  gives  us  the  right,  to  have  it.  But 
we  can  exact  of  our  leaders  that  they  shall  have  it  —  that  they 
shall  see  more  for  us  than  we  can  see  for  ourselves,  that  they 
shall  hold  their  vision  up  before  us  and  let  us  see  it,  and  let  us 
have  the  use  of  it,  that  they  shall  be  true  to  us,  that  they  shall 
be  the  big  brothers  of  the  people. 


CHAPTER  IX 

RULES  FOR  TELLING  A  HERO  — WHEN  ONE  SEES 

ONE 

I  HAVE  sometimes  hoped  that  the  modern  world  was  about 
to  produce  at  last  some  man  somewhere  with  a  big-hearted, 
easy  powerful  mind,  who  could  protect  the  French  Revolution. 
What  we  need  most  of  all  just  now  in  our  present  crisis  is  some 
man  who  could  take  up  the  French  Revolution  without  half 
trying,  all  the  world  looking  on  and  wondering  softly  how  he 
dares  to  do  it,  and  put  it  gently  but  firmly,  and  once  for  all, 
up  high  somewhere  where  no  one  except  geniuses,  or  at  least 
the  very  tallest-minded  people,  could  ever  again  get  at  it. 

As  it  is,  hardly  a  day  passes  but  one  sees  new  little  nobodies 
everywhere  all  about  one  reaching  up  without  half  thinking 
to  it  —  to  the  French  Revolution  —  grabbing  it  calmly,  and 
then  using  it  deliberately  before  our  eyes  as  a  general  free-for- 
all  analogy  for  anything  that  comes  into  their  heads.  The 
Syndicalists  and  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World  have  had 
the  use  of  it  last.  The  fact  that  the  French  Revolution 
was  French  and  that  it  worked  fairly  well  a  hundred  years 
ago  and  with  a  Louis  Sixteenth  sort  of  person,  and  as  a 
kind  of  first  rough  sketch,  or  draft  of  just  what  a  rev- 
olution might  be  for  once,  and  what  it  would  have  to  get 
over  being  afterward,  as  soon  as  possible,  never  seems  to  have 
occurred  to  many  people.  One  sees  them  rushing  about  the 
world  trying  to  get  up  exact  duplicates,  little  fussy  replicas 
of  a  revolution,  and  of  a  kind  of  revolution  that  the  real  world 
put  quietly  away  in  the  attic  seventy  years  ago.  The  real 
world,  and  all  the  men  in  it  who  are  facing  real  facts  to-day, 
are  getting  what  they  want  in  precisely  the  opposite  of  the 

337 


338  CROWDS 

violent,  theatrical  French-Revolution  way.  The  fact  that 
people  are  quite  different  now,  and  that  it  is  more  effective  and 
practical  to  get  new  ideas  into  their  heads  by  keeping  their 
heads  on  than  it  is  by  taking  their  heads  off  —  some  of  us  seem 
to  have  passed  over.  Living  as  we  do  in  a  world  to-day  with 
our  new  explosives,  our  new  antiseptics,  our  new  biology, 
bacteriology,  our  new  storage  batteries,  our  habit  of  getting 
everything  we  get  and  changing  everything  we  change  by  quietly 
and  coolly  looking  at  facts,  the  old  lumbering  fashion  of  having 
a  beautiful,  showy,  emotional  revolution  now  on  one  side,  and 
then  waiting  to  have  another  beautiful,  showy,  emotional 
revolution  on  the  other,  each  oscillating  back  and  forth  year 
by  year  until  people  finally  settle  down,  look  at  facts  together, 
become  scientific,  and  see  things  as  they  are  —  has  gone  by. 
We  have  not  time  for  revolutions  nowadays.  They  may 
be  amusing,  but  they  are  not  practical,  and  evolution  or 
re  volution- without-knowing-it,  or  evolution  all  together,  suit 
us  better.  We  are  in  a  world  in  which  we  are  seeing  men  almost 
being  made  over  before  our  eyes  by  the  scientific  habit  of 
thought  —  by  the  new,  slow,  imperious  way  we  have  come  to 
have  of  making  ourselves  look  at  things  at  which  we  would 
rather  not  look,  until  we  see  them  as  they  are.  The  man  of 
scientific  spirit,  the  quiet-minded,  implacable  man  who  gets 
what  he  wants  for  himself  and  for  others  by  merely  turning 
on  the  light,  who  makes  a  new  world  for  us  by  just  showing 
us  more  plainly  the  one  we  really  have,  possesses  the  earth. 

There  is  no  reason  why  revolutionists  should  feel  that  they 
are  particularly  courageous,  that  they  are  the  particularly  high- 
minded,  romantic,  adventurous,  uncompromising  and  superior 
people.  The  real  adventure,  the  abiding  emotion  and  wonder 
of  living  in  the  twentieth  century,  lies  in  the  high,  patient, 
slow,  quiet,  silent  enterprise  of  seeing  facts  as  they  are,  and 
without  any  fuss,  and  inexorably  and  with  good  cheer,  acting  on 
them.  The  human  race  has  a  new  temperament.  The  way 
to  fight  now  is  to  look,  to  look  first,  to  look  longest,  and  to 


RULES  FOR  TELLING  A  HERO  339 

look  for  the  most  people.  The  way  we  win  a  revolution  or 
bring  the  enemy  to  terms  to-day  is  by  battering  the  enemy  with 
cooperation,  with  understanding  him  and  being  understood  by 
him,  by  being  impregnably,  obstinately  his  brother,  by  piling 
up  huge  happy  citadels  of  good- will,  of  services  rendered,  ser- 
vices deserved,  and  services  returned.  We  had  an  idea  once 
that  the  way  to  conquer  a  man  was  by  hitting  the  outside  of 
him.  We  conquer  men  now  by  getting  inside  of  them,  and  by 
getting  inside  first  and  then  dealing  with  outside  things 
together. 

We  see  the  inside.  It  is  the  modern  note  to  see  the  inside, 
to  attack  the  essence,  the  spirit,  and  to  work  everything  out 
from  that. 

The  modern  method  of  being  courageous  and  of  defending 
what  we  want  is  a  kind  of  chemistry. 

Hercules  is  a  bust  now. 

We  prefer  still  little  women  like  Madame  Curie,  or  a  man 
like  Sir  Joseph  Lister,  or  like  Wilbur  Wright  —  the  courage 
that  faces  material  facts,  that  deals  with  the  elements  of  things, 
whether  in  a  bottle,  or  in  the  heaven  above  us,  or  in  the  earth, 
or  in  a  man,  or  in  an  enemy. 

When  the  subject-matter  is  human  nature  and  the  courage 
Ave  have  to  have  is  the  courage  that  can  deal  with  people,  we 
ask  ourselves:  "\Miat  are  the  most  diflBcult  facts  to  face  in 
people?" 

They  are: 

The  facts  about  how  they  are  different  from  us. 
The  facts  about  their  being  like  us. 
The  facts  as  to  what  we  can  do  about  it. 

So  it  has  come  to  seem  to  me  to  be  the  greatest,  the  most 
typical  and  diflBcult  courage  of  modern  life  and  of  a  crowd 
civilization,  the  courage  to  look  at  actual  facts  in  people  and 
to  see  how  the  people  can  be  made  to  go  together. 

A  man's  courage  is  his  sense  of  identity. 

A  man's  courage  toward  nature,  heat,  cold,  mountains,  seas. 


340  CROWDS 

deserts,  chemistry,  geology,  is  his  sense  of  identity  with  God 
and  of  his  right  to  share  with  God  in  the  creating  of  His 
world. 

His  courage  toward  people  is  his  sense  of  identity  with  men 
who  seem  different  from  him,  of  all  races,  all  classes,  and  all 
nations.  He  sees  the  differences  in  their  big  relations  along- 
side the  resemblances.  Then  he  fits  the  differences  into  the 
resemblances  and  knows  what  to  do. 

There  is  a  statue  of  Sir  George  Livesey,  one  of  the  early 
presidents  of  the  South  Metropolitan  Gas  Company,  placed  at 
the  entrance  of  the  works  where  thousands  of  workmen  day 
and  night  pass  in  and  pass  out. 

Sir  George  Livesey  was  the  man  who,  in  the  early  days  of 
the  South  Metropolitan  Gas  Company,  stood  out  against  all 
his  workmen,  for  six  long  weeks,  to  get  the  workmen  to  believe 
that  they  were  as  good  as  he  was.  He  believed  that  they  were 
capable,  or  should  be  capable,  of  being  identified  with  him  and 
working  with  him  as  partners,  of  sharing  in  the  direction  of  the 
business,  of  sharing  in  the  profits,  and  cooperating  all  day, 
every  day,  with  him  and  the  other  partners,  to  make  the  busi- 
ness a  success. 

He  did  not  propose  to  be  locked  up  in  a  business,  if  he  could 
help  it,  with  men  who  did  not  feel  identified  with  him,  who 
were  not  his  partners,  or  who  did  not  want  to  be. 

He  thought  it  was  not  good  business  to  engage  five  thousand 
men  and  pay  them  deliberately  so  much  a  day  to  fight  his 
business  on  the  inside  of  the  works.  Being  obliged  to  do  his 
business  as  a  fight  against  people  who  helped  him  all  the  time, 
watching  and  outwitting  them  as  if  he  were  dealing  with  five 
thousand  intelligent  gorillas  instead  of  with  fellow  human  be- 
ings, did  not  interest  him. 

He  did  not  believe  that  the  men  themselves,  in  spite  of  the 
way  they  talked,  when  they  came  to  think  of  it,  really  enjoyed 
being  intelligent  gorillas,  any  more  than  he  did. 

The  Trades  Unions  passed  a  resolution  that  it  was  safer  for 


RULES  FOR  TELLING  A  HERO  341 

the  men  in  dealing  with  Sir  George  Livesey  to  keep  on  being 
gorillas. 

Sir  George  Livesey  proposed  that  they  should  all  try  being 
fellow  human  beings  and  being  in  partnership  for  a  little  while 
and  see  how  it  worked. 

The  Trades  Unions  were  afraid  to  let  them  try.  Even  if  it 
worked  very  well,  and  if  it  turned  out  that  being  men  was  safer, 
in  this  one  particular  case,  than  being  gorillas,  it  would  set  a 
bad  example,  the  Trades  Unions  thought.  They  took  the 
ground  that  it  was  safer  to  have  all  men  treated  alike,  whether 
they  were  gorillas  or  not. 

They  instructed  the  men  to  strike.  The  South  Metropolitan 
Gas  Company  was  almost  closed  up,  but  it  did  not  yield. 

Sir  George  Livesey  took  the  ground  that  if  the  Trades  Unions 
believed  that  his  men  were  not  good  enough  for  him,  and  that 
he  was  not  good  enough  for  his  men,  he  would  wait  until  they 
did. 

The  bronze  statue  of  Sir  George  Livesey  that  the  men  have 
raised,  and  that  thousands  of  men  go  by  every  day,  day  after 
day,  and  look  up  to  at  their  work,  was  raised  to  a  man  who 
had  stood  out  against  his  workmen  for  weeks  to  prove  that 
they  were  as  good  as  he  was,  and  could  be  trusted  to  be  loyal 
to  him,  and  that  he  was  as  good  as  they  were,  and  that  he  could 
be  trusted  to  be  loyal  to  them. 

He  had  the  courage  to  insist  on  being,  whether  anybody 
wanted  it  for  the  moment  or  not,  a  new  kind  and  new  size  of 
man.  He  preferred  being  allowed  to  be  a  new  kind  and  new 
size  himself,  and  he  preferred  allowing  his  men  to  be  new  kinds 
and  new  sizes  of  men,  and  he  made  a  shrewd,  dogged  guess 
that  when  they  tried  it  they  would  like  it.  They  were  merely 
afraid  to  be  new  sizes,  as  we  all  are  at  first. 


There  are  possibly  three  ways  in  which,  in  the  confusion  of 
our  modern  world,  one  can  tell  a  hero  when  one  sees  one. 


342  CROWDS 

One  knows  a  hero  first  by  his  originahty.  He  invents  a  new 
kind  and  new  size  of  man.  He  finishes  off  one  sample.  There 
he  is. 

The  next  thing  one  notices  about  this  man  (when  he  is  in- 
vented) is  his  humihty.  He  never  seems  to  feel  —  having 
invented  himself  —  how  original  he  is.  The  more  original 
people  think  he  is,  and  the  more  they  try  to  set  him  one  side 
as  an  exception,  the  more  he  resents  it. 

And  then,  of  course,  the  final  way  one  knows  a  man  is  a 
hero  is  always  by  his  courage,  by  his  masterful  way  of  driving 
through,  when  he  meets  a  man,  to  his  sense  of  identity  with 
him. 

One  always  sees  a  hero  going  about  quietly  everywhere, 
treating  every  other  man  as  if  he  were  a  hero  too. 

He  gets  so  in  the  habit,  from  day  to  day  (living  with  himself), 
of  believing  in  human  nature,  that  when  he  finds  himself  sud- 
denly up  against  other  people  he  cannot  stop. 

It  is  not  that  he  is  deceived  about  the  other  people,  though 
it  might  seem  so  sometimes.  He  merely  sees  further  into  them 
and  further  for  them. 

Has  he  not  invented  himself.^  Is  he  not  at  this  very  moment 
a  better  kind  of  man  than  he  thought  he  could  be  once.''  Is 
he  not  going  to  be  a  better  kind  to-morrow  than  he  is  now-f* 

So,  quietly,  he  keeps  on  year  by  year  and  day  by  day,  treating 
other  people  as  if  they  were,  or  were  meant  to  be,  the  same 
kind  of  man  that  he  is,  until  they  are. 


CHAPTER  X 
WHO  IS  AJ^RAID? 

WHEN  Christ  turned  the  other  cheek,  the  last  thing  He 
would  hav'e  wanted  any  one  to  think  was  that  He  was  backing 
down,  or  that  He  was  merely  being  a  sweet,  gentle,  grieved 
person.  He  was  inventing  before  everybody,  and  before  His 
enemies,  promptly  and  with  great  presence  of  mind,  a  new 
kind  and  new  size  of  man.  It  was  a  more  spirited,  more  origi- 
nal, more  unconquerable  and  bewildering  way  of  fighting  than 
anybody  had  thought  of  before.  To  be  suddenly  in  an  enemy's 
presence  a  new  kind  and  new  size  of  man  —  colossal,  baffling  — 
to  turn  into  invisibility  before  him,  into  intangibility,  into 
another  kind  of  being  before  the  enemy's  eyes,  so  that  he  could 
not  possibly  tell  what  to  do,  and  so  that  none  of  the  things 
that  he  had  thought  of  to  do  would  work.  .  .  .  This  is  what 
Christ  was  doing,  it  seems  to  some  of  us,  and  it  is  apparently 
the  way  He  felt  about  it  when  He  did  it. 

Turning  the  other  cheek  is  a  kind  of  moral  jiu-jitsu. 


The  last  thing  that  many  of  us  who  are  interested  in  the 
modern  world  really  want  is  to  have  war,  or  fighting,  stop.  We 
glory  in  courage,  in  the  power  of  facing  danger,  in  adven- 
turesomeness  of  spirit,  in  every  single  one  of  the  qualities' 
that  always  have  made,  and  always  will  make,  every  true 
man  a  fighter. 

We  contend  that  fighting,  as  at  present  conducted,  is  based 
on  fear  and  lazy-mindedness ;  that  it  is  lacking  in  the  manlier 

343 


344  CROWDS 

qualities,  that  the  biggest  and  newest  kind  of  men  are  not 
willing  to  be  in  it,  and  that  it  does  not  work. 

We  would  rather  see  the  world  abolished  than  to  see  war 
abolished. 

We  want  to  see  war  brought  up  to  date. 

The  best  way  to  fight  was  invented  some  two  thousand  years 
ago,  and  the  innocent,  conventional  persons  who  still  believe 
in  a  kind  of  routine,  or  humdrum,  of  shooting,  who  have  not 
caught  up  with  this  two-thousand-year-old  invention,  are 
about  to  be  irrevocably  displaced  in  our  modern  life  by  men 
who  have  a  livelier,  more  far-seeing,  more  practical,  more 
modern  kind  of  courage.  From  this  time  on  we  have  made 
up  our  minds,  we,  the  people  of  this  world,  that  the  only  men 
we  are  going  to  allow  to  fight  for  us  are  the  men  who  can  fight 
the  way  Christ  did. 

Men  who  have  not  the  courage  to  fight  the  way  Christ  did 
are  about  to  be  shut  up  by  society;  no  one  will  harm  them,  of 
course,  innocent,  afraid  persons,  who  have  to  protect  them- 
selves with  gunpowder,  but  they  will  merely  be  set  one  side 
after  this,  where  they  will  not  be  in  a  position  to  spoil  the  fight- 
ing of  the  men  who  are  not  afraid. 

And  who  are  the  men  who  are  not  afraid? 

To  search  your  enemy's  heart,  to  amputate,  as  by  a  kind  of 
spiritual  surgery,  the  very  desire  for  fighting  in  him,  to  untangle 
his  own  life  before  his  eyes  and  suddenly  make  him  see  what 
it  is  he  really  wants,  to  have  him  standing  there  quietly,  radi- 
antly disarmed,  gentle-hearted,  and  like  a  child  before  you; 
if  you  are  able.  Gentle  Reader,  or  ever  have  been  able,  to  do 
this,  you  are  not  afraid!  Why  should  any  one  ever  have  sup- 
posed that  it  takes  a  backing  down,  giving  up,  teary,  weak,  and 
grieved  person  to  do  this.'* 

Christ  expressed  His  idea  of  courage  very  mildly  when  He 
said,  in  effect:  "Blessed  are  those  who  dare  to  be  meek,  for 
they  shall  inherit  the  earth." 

It  takes  a  bolder  front  to  step  up  to  a  man  one  knows  is  one's 


WHO  IS  AFKAID?  345 

enemy  and  cooperate  with  him  than  it  does  to  do  a  Uttle, 
simple,  thoughtless,  outside  thing  like  stepping  up  to  him  and 
knocking  him  down. 

Cooperating  with  a  man  in  spite  of  him,  moving  over  to 
where  he  is,  winning  a  victory  over  him  by  getting  at  his  most 
rooted,  most  protected,  secret,  instinctive  feelings,  literally 
striking  him  through  to  the  heart  and  making  a  new  kind  of 
man  out  of  him  before  his  own  eyes,  by  being  a  new  kind  of 
man  to  him,  takes  a  bigger,  stiller  courage,  is  a  more  exposed 
and  dangerous  thing  to  do  than  to  fall  on  him  and  fight  him. 

It  is  also  more  practical.  The  one  cool,  practical,  hard- 
headed  way  to  win  a  victory  over  an  enemy  is  to  do  the  thing 
that  makes  him  the  most  afraid.  And  there  is  no  man  people 
are  more  afraid  of  than  the  man  who  stands  up  to  them,  quietly 
looks  at  them,  and  will  not  fight  with  them.  He  is  doing  the 
;*  lie  thing  of  all  others  to  them  that  they  would  not  dare  to  do. 
They  wonder  what  such  a  man  thinks.  If  he  dares  stand  up 
before  them  and  face  them  with  nothing  but  thinking,  what  is 
he  thinking  .'^ 

What  he  thinks,  if  it  makes  him  able  to  do  a  thing  like  this, 
must  have  some  man-stuff  in  it.  They  prefer  to  wait  and  see 
what  he  thinks. 

Courage  consists  in  not  being  afraid  of  one's  own  mind  and 
of  other  people's  minds,  TMien  men  become  so  afraid  of  one 
another's  minds  and  of  their  ovm  minds  that  they  cannot  think, 
they  have  to  back  down  and  fight.     They  are  cowards. 

They  do  not  know  what  they  think. 

They  do  not  know  what  they  want. 


CHAPTER  XI 
THE  TECHNIQUE  OF  COURAGE 

I  HAVE  never  known  a  coward. 

I  have  known  men  who  did  cowardly  things  and  who  were 
capable  of  cowardly  thoughts,  but  I  have  never  known  a  man 
who  could  be  fairly  and  finally  classified  as  a  coward. 

Courage  is  a  process. 

If  people  are  cowards  it  is  because  they  are  in  a  hurry. 

They  have  not  taken  the  pains  to  see  what  they  think. 

The  man  who  has  taken  the.  time  to  think  down  through  to 
what  he  really  wants  and  to  what  he  is  bound  to  get,  is  always 
(and  sometimes  very  suddenly  and  unexpectedly)  a  courageous 
man.  • 

It  is  the  man  who  is  half  wondering  whether  he  really  wants 
what  he  thinks  he  wants  or  not,  or  whether  he  can  get  it  or  not, 
who  is  a  coward. 

The  coward  is  a  half  man.  He  is  slovenly  minded  about 
himself.  He  gets  out  of  the  hard  work  of  seeing  through 
himself,  of  driving  on  through  what  he  supposes  he  wants,  to 
what  he  knows  he  wants. 

So,  after  all,  it  is  a  long,  slow,  patient  pull,  being  a  courageous 
man.  Few  men  have  the  nerve  to  take  the  time  to  attend  to 
it. 

The  first  part  of  courage  consists  in  all  this  hard  work  one 
has  to  put  in  on  one's  soul  day  after  day,  and  over  and  over 
again,  doggedly,  going  back  to  it.     What  is  it  that  I  really  want? 

The  second,  or  more  brilliant-looking  part  of  courage,  the 
courageous  act  itself  (like  Roosevelt's  when  he  is  shot),  which 
everybody  notices,  is  easy.     The  real  courage  is  over  then. 

S46 


THE  TECHNIQUE  OF  COURAGE  347 

Courage  consists  in  seeing  so  clearly  something  that  one 
wants  to  get  that  one  is  more  afraid  of  not  getting  it  than  one 
is  of  anything  that  can  get  in  the  way. 

The  first  thing  that  society  is  ever  able  to  do  with  the  lowest 
type  of  labouring  man  seems  to  be  to  get  him  to  want  something. 
It  has  to  think  out  ways  of  getting  him  waked  up,  of  getting 
him  to  be  decently  selfish,  and  to  want  something  for  himself. 
He  only  wants  a  little  at  first;  he  wants  something  for  himself 
to-day  and  he  has  courage  for  to-day.  Then  perhaps  he  wants 
something  for  himself  for  to-morrow,  or  next  week,  or  next 
year,  and  he  has  courage  for  next  week,  or  for  next  year.  Then 
he  wants  something  for  his  family,  or  for  his  wife,  and  he  has 
courage  for  his  family,  or  for  his  wife. 

Gradually  he  sees  further  and  wants  something  for  his  class. 
His  courage  mounts  up  by  leaps  and  bounds  when  he  is  lib- 
erated into  his  class.  Then  he  discovers  the  implacable  mutual 
interest  of  his  class  with  the  other  classes,  and  he  thinks  of 
things  he  wants  for  all  the  classes.  He  thinks  the  classes  to- 
gether into  a  world,  and  becomes  a  man.  He  has  courage  for 
the  world. 

^Vhen  men  see,  whether  they  are  rich  or  poor,  what  they 
want,  what  they  believe  they  can  get,  they  are  not  afraid. 

The  next  great  work  of  the  best  employers  is  to  get  labour 
to  want  enough.  Labour  is  tired  and  mechanical-minded. 
The  next  work  of  the  better  class  of  labourer,  or  the  stronger 
kind  of  Trades  Union,  is  to  get  capital  to  want  enough.  Capi- 
tal is  tired,  too.  It  does  not  see  really  big,  worth-while  things 
that  can  be  done  with  capital,  and  has  no  courage  for  these 
things. 

The  larger  the  range  and  the  larger  the  variety  of  social  desire 
the  greater  the  courage. 

The  problem  in  modern  industry  is  the  arousing  of  the 
imaginations  of  capitalists  and  labourers  so  that  they  see 
something  that  gives  them  courage  for  themselves  and  for 
one  another,  and  courage  for  the  world. 


348  CROWDS 

The  world  belongs  to  the  men  of  vision  —  the  men  who  are 
not  afraid  —  the  men  who  see  things  that  they  have  made  up 
their  minds  to  get. 

Who  are  the  men  to-day,  in  all  walks  of  life,  who  want  the 
most  things  for  the  most  people,  and  who  have  made  up  their 
minds  to  get  them? 

There  is  just  one  man  we  will  follow  to-day  —  those  of  us 
who  belong  to  the  crowd  —  the  man  who  is  alive  all  over, 
who  is  deeply  and  gloriously  covetous,  the  man  who  sees 
things  he  wants  for  himself,  and  who  therefore  has  courage  for 
himself,  and  who  sees  things  he  wants  and  is  bound  to  get  for 
other  people,  and  who  therefore  has  courage  for  other  people. 

This  is  the  hardest  kind  of  courage  to  have  —  courage  iot 
other  people. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE  MEN  WHO  WANT  THINGS 

DURING  the  coal  strike  I  took  up  my  morning  paper  and 
read  from  a  speech  by  Vernon  Hartshorn,  the  miners'  leader: 
"In  a  week's  time,  by  tying  up  the  railways  and  other  means 
of  transportation,  we  could  so  paralyze  the  country  that  the 
government  would  come  to  us  on  their  knees  and  beg  us  to  go 
to  work  on  terms  they  are  now  flouting  as  impossible." 

During  the  dockers'  strike  I  took  up  my  morning  paper  and 
read  Ben  Tillett's  speech,  at  the  meeting  the  day  before,  to 
fifty  thousand  strikers  on  Tower  Hill.  "  'I  am  going  to  ask 
you  to  join  me  in  a  prayer,'  Tillett  said.  'Lord  Devonport 
has  contributed  to  the  murder,  by  starvation,  of  your  children, 
your  women,  and  your  men.  I  am  not  going  to  ask  you  to  do 
it,  but  I  am  going  to  call  on  God  to  strike  Lord  Devonport 
dead,'  He  asked  those  who  were  prepared  to  repeat  the 
*  prayer'  to  hold  up  their  hands.  Countless  hands  were  held 
up,  with  cries:  'Strike  him  doubly  stone  dead!'  The  men 
then  repeated  the  following  'prayer',  word  for  word,  after 
Tillett: 

"  'O  God,  strike  Lord  Devonport  dead.' 

"Afterward  the  strikers  chanted  the  words:  'He  shall  die! 
He  shall  die!'" 

There  are  times  when  it  is  very  hard  to  have  courage  for 
other  people. 

It  is  when  one  watches  people  doing  cowardly  things  that 
one  finds  it  hardest  to  have  courage  for  them. 

349 


350  CROWDS 

I  felt  the  same  way  both  mornings  at  first  when  I  held  my 
paper  in  my  hand  and  thought  about  what  I  had  read,  about 
the  government's  going  down  on  its  knees,  and  about  God's 
striking  Lord  Devonport  dead. 

The  first  feeling  was  one  of  profound  resentment,  shame  — 
a  huge,  helpless,  muddle-headed  anger. 

I  had  not  the  slightest  trace  of  courage  for  the  miners;  I 
did  not  see  how  the  government  could  have  any  courage  for 
them.  And  I  had  no  courage  for  the  dockers,  or  for  what 
could  be  expected  of  the  dockers.  I  did  not  see  how  Lord 
Devonport  could  have  any  courage  for  them. 

I  repeated  their  prayer  to  myself. 

The  dockers  were  cowards.  I  was  not  going  to  try  to  sym- 
pathize with  them,  or  try  to  be  reasonable  about  them.  It 
was  nothing  that  they  were  desperate  and  had  prayed.  Was 
I  not  desperate  too?  Would  not  the  very  thought  that  fifty 
thousand  men  could  pray  a  prayer  like  that  make  any  man 
desperate?  It  was  as  if  I  had  stood  and  heard  fifty  thousand 
beasts  roaring  to  their  god. 

"They  are  desperate,"  I  said  to  myself:  "I  will  not  take 
what  they  think  seriously.  It  does  not  matter  what  desperate 
people  think." 

Then  I  waited  a  minute.  "But  I  am  desperate,  too,"  I 
said;  "I  must  not  take  what  I  think  seriously.  It  does  not 
matter  what  desperate  people  think." 

I  thought  about  this  a  little,  and  drove  it  in. 

"What  I  think  will  matter  more  a  little  later,  perhaps,  when 
I  get  over  being  desperate." 

"Perhaps  what  the  dockers  think  will  matter  more  a  little 
later,  too." 

In  the  meantime  are  not  their  scared  and  hateful  opinions 
as  good  as  my  scared  and  hateful  opinions? 

The  important  and  final  opinions,  the  ones  to  be  taken  seri- 
ously, that  can  be  acted  on,  will  be  the  opinions  of  those  who 
get  over  being  scared  and  hateful  first. 


THE  MEN  WHO  WANT  THINGS  351 

Then  I  stood  up  for  myself. 

I  had  a  reason  for  being  scared  and  hateful.  They  and  their 
prayer  drove  me  to  be  scared  and  hateful. 

I  thought  again. 

Perhaps  they  had  a  reason,  too. 

Then  it  all  came  over  me.  I  became  a  human  being  all  in  a 
minute  when  I  thought  of  it. 

I  became  suddenly  full  of  courage  for  the  hateful  dockers. 

I  thought  how  much  more  discouraging  it  would  be  if  they 
had  not  been  hateful  at  all. 


I  do  not  imagine  God  was  sorry  when  He  heard  those  fifty 
thousand  dockers  asking  Him  to  strike  Lord  Devonport  dead. 

Not  that  He  would  have  approved  of  it. 

It  was  not  the  last  word  of  wisdom  or  reasonableness.  It 
was  lacking  in  beauty  and  distinction  as  a  petition,  as  being 
just  the  right  form  of  prayer  for  those  fifty  thousand  faultless 
dockers  up  on  Tower  Hill  that  afternoon  (the  whole  of  London 
listening,  in  that  shocked  and  proper  way  that  London  has). 

But  I  have  not  lost  all  courage  for  the  dockers  who  made 
it. 

They  still  want  something!  They  still  are  men!  They  still 
stand  up  when  they  speak  to  Heaven!  There  is  some  stuff  in 
them  yet!  They  make  heaven  and  earth  ring  to  get  a  word 
with  God! 

This  all  means  something  to  God,  probably. 

Perhaps  it  might  mean  something  to  us. 

We  are  superior  persons,  it  is  true.  We  do  not  pray  the  way 
they  pray. 

We  beheve  in  being  more  self-controlled.  We  take  our 
breakfasts  quietly,  and  with  high  collars  and  silk  hats,  and 
with  gilt  prayer-books  we  go  into  the  presence  of  our  Maker. 
We  believe  in  being  calm  and  reasonable. 

But  if  men  who  have  not  enough  to  eat  are  so  half-dead  and 


352  CROWDS 

so  worthless  that  they  can  feel  calm  and  reasonable  about  it, 
and  can  always  be  precisely  right  and  always  say  precisely 
the  right  thing  —  if,  with  their  wives  fainting  in  their  arms  and 
their  babies  crying  for  food,  all  that  those  dockers  had  character 
enough  to  do,  up  on  Tower  Hill,  was  to  make  a  polite,  smooth, 
Anglican  prayer  to  God  —  a  prayer  like  a  kind  of  blessing 
before  not  having  any  meat,  and  not  that  awful,  fateful,  husky 
cry  to  Heaven,  a  roar  or  rending  of  their  hearts  up  to  the  black 
and  empty  sky  —  what  would  such  men  have  been  good  for? 
What  hope  or  courage  could  any  one  have  for  them,  for  such 
men  at  such  a  time,  if  they  would  not,  if  they  could  not,  come 
thundering  and  breaking  into  His  presence,  fifty  thousand 
strong,  to  get  what  they  want? 

I  may  not  know  God,  but  whatever  else  He  is,  I  feel  sure 
that  He  is  not  a  precise  stickler-god,  that  He  is  not  pompous 
about  spiritual  manners,  a  huge,  literal-minded,  Proper  Person, 
who  cannot  make  allowances  for  human  nature,  who  cannot 
hear  what  humble,  rough  men  like  these,  hewing  their  vast 
desires  for .  Him  out  of  darkness,  and  out  of  little  foolish  words, 
are  trying  to  say  to  Him. 

And  perhaps  we,  too,  do  not  need  to  be  literal-minded  about 
a  prayer  that  we  may  hear,  or  that  we  may  overhear,  roaring 
its  way  up  past  our  smooth,  beautiful  lives  rudely  to  Heaven. 

What  is  the  gist  of  the  prayer  to  God,  and  to  us? 

What  is  it  that  the  men  are  trying  to  say  in  this  awful,  flaming, 
blackening  metaphor  of  wishing  Lord  Devonport  dead? 

The  gist  of  it  is  that  they  mean  to  say,  whether  they  are 
right  or  wrong  (like  us,  as  we  would  say,  whether  we  were 
right  or  wrong),  they  mean  to  say  that  they  have  a  right  to 
live. 

In  other  words,  the  gist  of  it  is  that  we  are  like  them,  and 
that  they  are  like  us. 

I,  too,  in  my  hour  of  deepest  trial,  with  no  silk  hat,  with  no 
gloves,  with  no  gilt  prayer-book,  as  I  should,  have  flashed  out 
my  will  upon  my  God.    I,  too,  have  cried  with  Paul,  with  Job, 


THE  MEN  WHO  WANT  THINGS  353 

across  my  sin  —  my  sin  that  very  moment  heaped  up  upon 
my  hps  —  have  broken  wildly  in  upon  that  still,  white  floor 
of  Heaven ! 

And  when  the  dockers  break  up  through,  fling  themselves 
upon  their  God,  what  is  it,  after  all,  but  another  way  of  saying, 
"I  am  persuaded  that  neither  death,  nor  life,  nor  angels,  nor 
principalities,  nor  powers,  nor  things  present,  nor  things  to 
come,  nor  height,  nor  depth,  nor  any  other  creature,  shall  be 
able  to  separate  us  from  the  love  of  God,     .     ,     ." 

It  may  have  been  wicked  in  the  dockers  to  address  God  in 
this  way,  but  it  would  have  been  more  wicked  in  them  not  to 
think  He  could  understand. 

I  believe,  for  one,  that  when  Jacob  wrestled  with  the  angel, 
God  looked  on  and  liked  it. 

The  angel  was  a  mere  representative  at  best,  and  Jacob  was 
really  wrestling  with  God. 

And  God  knew  it  and  liked  it. 

Praying  to  strike  Lord  Devonport  dead  was  the  dockers* 
way  of  saying  to  God  that  there  was  something  on  their  minds 
that  simply  could  not  be  said. 

I  can  imagine  that  this  would  interest  a  God,  a  prayer  like 
the  dockers'  prayer,  so  spent,  so  desperate,  so  unreasonable, 
breaking  through  to  that  still,  white  floor  of  Heaven ! 

And  it  does  seem  as  if,  in  our  more  humble,  homely,  and 
useful  capacity  as  fellow  human  beings,  it  might  interest  us. 

It  seems  as  if,  possibly,  we  might  stop  criticising  people  who 
pray  harder  than  we  do,  pointing  out  that  wrestling  with  God 
is  really  rather  rude  —  as  if  we  might  stop  and  see  what  it 
means  to  God  and  what  it  means  to  us,  and  what  there  is  that 
we  might  do,  you  and  I,  oh.  Gentle  Reader,  to  make  it  pos- 
sible for  the  dockers  on  Tower  Hill  to  be  more  polite,  per- 
haps, more  polished,  as  it  were,  when  they  speak  to  God  next 
time. 

Perhaps  nothing  the  dockers  could  do  in  the  waj'  of  being 
violent  could  be  more  stupid  and  wicked  than  having  all  these 


354  CROWDS 

sleek,  beautiful,  perfect  people,  twenty-six  million  of  them, 
all  expecting  them  not  to  be  violent. 

In  my  own  quiet,  gentle,  implacable  beauty  of  spirit,  in  my 
own  ruthless  wisdom  on  a  full  stomach,  I  do  not  deny  that  I 
do  most  sternly  disapprove  of  the  dockers  and  their  violence. 

But  it  is  better  than  nothing,  thank  God! 

They  want  something. 

It  gives  me  something  to  hope  for,  and  to  have  courage  for, 
about  them  —  that  they  want  something. 

Possibly  if  we  could  get  them  started  wanting  something, 
even  some  little  narrow  and  rather  mean  thing,  like  having 
enough  to  eat  —  possibly  they  will  go  on  to  art  galleries,  to 
peace  societies,  and  cathedrals  next,  and  to  making  very  beau- 
tiful prayers (  alas.  Gentle  Reader,  how  can  I  say  it.')  like  you 
—  Heaven  help  us ! —  and  like  me ! 

I  would  have  but  one  objection  to  letting  the  dockers  have 
their  full  way,  and  to  letting  the  control  of  the  situation  be  put 
into  their  hands. 

They  do  not  hunger  enough. 

They  are  merely  hungering  for  themselves. 

This  may  be  a  reason  for  not  letting  the  world  get  entirely 
into  their  hands,  but  in  the  meantime  we  have  every  reason  to 
be  appreciative  of  the  good  the  dockers  are  doing  (so  far  as  it 
goes)  in  hungering  for  themselves. 

It  would  be  strange  indeed  if  one  could  not  tolerate  in  dockers 
a  little  thing  like  this.  Babies  do  it.  It  is  the  first  decency 
in  all  of  us.  It  is  the  first  condition  of  our  knowing  enough,  or 
amounting  to  enough,  to  ever  hunger  for  any  one  else.  Every- 
body ^has  to  make  a  beginning  somewhere.  Even  a  Saint 
Francis,  the  man  who  hungers  and  thirsts  for  righteousness, 
who  rises  to  the  heights  of  social-mindedness,  who  hungers  and 
thirsts  for  everybody,  begins  all  alone,  at  the  breast. 

Which  is  there  of  us  who,  if  we  had  not  begun  our  own 
hungering  and  thirsting  for  righteousness,  our  tugging  on  God, 


THE  MEN  WHO  WANT  THINGS  355 

in  this  old,  lonely,  preoccupied,  selfish-looking  way,  would  ever 
have  grown  up,  would  ever  have  wanted  enough  things  to 
belong  to  a  Church  of  England,  for  instance,  or  to  a  Congrega- 
tional Home  Missionary  Society? 

It  is  true  that  the  dockers  are,  for  the  moment  (alas,  fifty  or 
sixty  years  or  so!),  merely  wanting  things  for  themselves,  or 
wanting  things  for  their  own  class.  And  so  would  we  if  we  had 
been  born,  brought  up,  and  embedded  in  a  society  which 
allowed  us  so  little  for  ourselves  that  not  growing  up  morally — 
keeping  on  over  and  over  again,  year  after  year,  just  want- 
ing things  for  ourselves,  and  not  really  being  weaned  yet  — 
was  all  that  was  left  to  us. 

There  is  really  considerable  spiritual  truth  in  having  enough 
to  eat. 

Sometimes  I  have  thought  it  would  be  not  unhelpful,  would 
make  a  little  ring  of  gentle-heartedness  around  us,  some  of 
us  — those  of  us  who  live  protected  lives  and  pray  such  rich, 
versatile  prayers,  if  we  would  stop  and  think  what  a  docker 
would  have  to  do,  what  arrangements  a  docker  would  have 
to  make  before  he  could  enjoy  praying  with  us — falling  back 
into  our  beautiful,  soft,  luxurious  wanting  things  for  others. 

Possibly  these  arrangements,  such  as  they  are,  are  the  ones 
the  dockers  are  trying  to  make  with  Lord  Devonport  now. 

The  docker  is  trying  to  get  through  hungering  for  some- 
thing to  eat,  to  arrange  gradually  to  have  his  hungers  move 
on. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
MEN  WHO  GET  THINGS 

ALL  the  virtues  are  hungers.  A  vice  is  the  failure  of  desire, 
A  vice  is  a  man's  failure  to  have  enough  big  hungers  at  hand, 
sternly  within  reach,  to  control  his  little  ones. 

A  man  who  is  doing  wrong  is  essentially  bored.  He  has  let 
himself  drop  into  doing  rows  of  half-things,  or  things  which  he 
can  only  half  do.  He  forgets,  for  the  moment,  what  it  really 
is  that  he  wants,  or  possibly  that  he  wants  anything.  Then  it 
is  that  the  one  little,  mean  Lonely  Hunger  —  a  glass  of  liquor, 
a  second  piece  of  pie,  another  man's  wife,  or  a  million  dollars, 
runs  away  with  him. 

When  a  man  sins  it  is  because  his  appetites  fail  him.  Self- 
control  lies  in  maintaining  checks  and  balances  of  desire,  cen- 
tripetals,  and  centrifugals  of  desire.  The  worst  thing  that  could 
happen  to  the  world  would  be  to  have  it  placed  in  the  hands  of 
men  who  only  have  a  gift  of  hungering  for  certain  sorts  of  things, 
or  hungering  for  certain  classes  of  people,  or  hungering  for 
themselves. 

We  do  not  want  the  man  who  is  merely  hungering  for  him- 
self to  rule  the  world  —  not  because  we  feel  superior 
to  him,  but  because  a  man  who  is  merely  hungering  for 
himself  cannot  be  taken  seriously  as  an  authority  on 
worlds.  People  can  take  him  seriously  as  an  authority 
on  his  own  hunger.  But  what  he  thinks  about  everything 
beyond  that  point  cannot  be  taken  seriously.  What  he 
thinks  about  how  the  world  should  be  run,  about  what  other 
people  want,  what  labour  and  capital  want,  cannot  be  taken 
seriously. 

866 


MEN  WHO  GET  THINGS  357 

I  will  not  yield  place  to  any  one  in  my  sympathy  with  the 
dockers. 

I  like  to  think  that  I  too,  given  the  same  grandfathers,  the 
same  sleeping  rooms  and  neighbours,  the  same  milk,  the  same 
tincture  of  religion,  would  dare  to  do  what  they  have  done. 

But  I  cannot  be  content,  as  I  take  my  stand  by  the  dockers, 
with  sympathizing  in  general.  I  want  to  sympathize  to  the 
point. 

And  on  the  practical  side  of  what  to  do  next  in  behalf  of  the 
dockers,  or  of  what  to  let  them  do,  I  find  myself  facing  two  facts : 

First,  the  dockers  are  desperate.  I  take  their  desperation 
as  conclusive  and  imperative.     It  must  be  obeyed. 

Second,  I  do  not  care  what  they  think. 

What  they  think  must  not  be  obeyed.  Men  who  are  in  the 
act  of  being  scared  or  hateful,  whether  it  be  for  five  minutes, 
five  months,  or  sixty  years,  who  have  given  up  their  courage 
for  others,  or  for  their  enemies,  are  not  practical.  WTiat  a  man 
who  despairs  of  everybody  except  himself  thinks,  does  not  work 
and  cannot  be  made  to  work.  The  fact  that  the  dockers  have 
no  courage  about  their  employers  may  be  largely  the  employers' 
fault.  It  is  largely  the  fault  of  society,  of  the  churches,  the 
schools,  the  daily  press.  But  the  fact  remains,  and  whichever 
side  in  the  contest  has,  or  is  able  to  have,  first,  the  most  courage 
for  the  other  side,  whichever  side  wants  the  most  for  the  other 
side,  will  be  the  side  that  will  get  the  most  control. 

If  Labour,  in  the  form  of  syndicalism,  wants  to  grasp  the  raw 
materials,  machinery,  and  management  of  modern  industry 
out  of  the  hands  of  the  capitalists  and  run  the  world,  the  one 
shrewd,  invincible  way  for  Labour  to  do  it  is  going  to  be  to 
want  more  things  for  more  people  than  capitalists  can  want. 

The  only  people,  to-day,  who  are  going  to  be  competent  to 
run  a  world,  or  who  can  get  hold  of  even  one  end  of  it  to  try  to 
run  it,  are  going  to  be  the  people  who  want  a  world,  who  have 
a  habit,  who  may  be  said  to  be  almost  in  a  rut,  of  wanting 
things  all  day,  every  day,  for  a  world  —  men  who  cannot  keep 


358  CROWDS 

narrowed  down  very  long  at  a  time  to  wanting  things  for  them- 
selves. 

There  will  be  little  need  of  our  all  falling  into  a  panic,  or  all 
being  obliged  to  rely  on  policemen,  or  to  call  out  troops  to  stave 
off  an  uprising  of  the  labour  classes  as  long  as  the  labour  classes 
are  merely  wanting  things  for  themselves.  It  is  the  men  who 
have  the  bigger  hungers  who  are  getting  the  bigger  sorts  of 
things — things  like  worlds  into  their  hands.  The  me-man  and 
the  class-man,  under  our  modern  conditions,  are  being  more  and 
more  kept  back  and  held  under  in  the  smaller  places,  the 
me-places  and  class-places,  by  the  men  who  want  more  things 
than  they  can  want,  who  lap  over  into  wanting  things  for 
others 

The  me-man  often  may  see  what  he  wants  clearly  and  may 
say  what  he  wants. 

But  he  does  not  get  it.     It  is  the  class-man  who  gets  it  for  him. 

The  class-man  may  see  what  he  wants  for  his  class  clearly 
and  may  say  what  he  wants. 

But  he  does  not  get  it.  It  is  the  crowd-man  who  gets  it  for 
him. 

It  is  a  little  startling,  the  grim,  brilliant,  beautiful  way  that 
God  has  worked  it  out ! 

It  is  one  of  His  usual  paradoxes. 

The  thing  in  a  man  that  makes  it  possible  for  him  to  get 
things  more  than  other  people  can  get  them  is  his  .margin  of 
unselfishness. 

He  gets  things  by  seeing  with  the  thing  that  he  wants  all  that 
lies  around  it.  With  equal  clearness  he  is  seeing  all  the  time 
the  people  and  the  things  that  are  in  the  way  of  what  he  wants; 
how  the  people  look  or  try  to  look,  how  they  feel  or  try  to 
make  him  think  they  feel,  what  they  believe  and  do  not  believe 
or  can  be  made  to  believe;  he  sees  what  he  wants  in  a  vast 
setting  of  what  he  cannot  get  with  people,  and  of  what  he 
can  —  in  a  huge  moving  picture  of  the  interests  of  others. 

The  man  who,  in  fulfilling  and  making  the  most  of  himself, 


MEN  WHO  GET  THINGS  359 

can  get  outside  of  himself  into  his  class,  who,  in  being  a  good 
class-man,  can  overflow  into  being  a  man  of  the  world,  is  the 
man  who  gets  what  he  wants. 

I  am  hopeful  about  Labour  and  Capital  to-day  because  in 
the  industrial  world,  as  at  present  constituted  in  our  cooperative 
age,  the  men  who  can  get  what  they  want,  who  get  results  out 
of  other  people,  are  the  men  who  have  the  largest,  most  sensitive 
outfits  for  wanting  things  for  other  people. 

If  there  is  one  thing  rather  than  another  that  fills  one  with 
courage  for  the  outlook  of  labouring  men  to-day  it  is  the  colossal 
failure  Ben  Tillett  makes  in  leading  them  in  prayer. 

Even  the  dockers,  perhaps  the  most  casually  employed,  the 
most  spent  and  desperate  class  of  Labour  of  all,  only  prayed 
Ben  Tillet's  prayer  a  minute  and  they  were  sorry  the  day 
after. 

And  it  was  Ben  Tillett's  prayer  in  the  end  that  lost  them 
their  cause  —  a  prayer  that  filled  all  England  on  the  next  day 
with  the  rage  of  Labour  —  that  a  man  like  Ben  Tillett,  with 
such  a  mean,  scared,  narrow  little  prayer,  should  dare  to 
represent  Labour. 

In  the  same  way,  after  the  shooting  in  the  Lawrence  strike, 
when  all  those  men  (Syndicalists)  had  streamed  through  the 
streets,  showing  off  before  everybody  their  fine,  brave-looking 
thoughtless,  superficial,  guillotine  feelings  and  their  furious 
little  banner,  "No  God  and  no  Master" . —  it  did  one  good,  only 
a  day  or  so  later,  to  see  a  vast  crowd  of  Lawrence  workers, 
thirty  thousand  strong,  tramping  through  the  str&ets,  singing, 
with  bands  of  music,  and  with  banners,  "In  God  we  trust"  and 
"One  is  our  Master,  even  Christ"  —  thousands  of  men  who 
had  never  been  inside  a  church,  thousands  of  men  who  could 
never  have  looked  up  a  verse  in  the  Bible,  still  found  themselves 
marching  in  a  procession,  snatching  up  these  old  and  pious 
mottoes  and  joining  in  hymns  they  did  not  know,  all  to  con- 
tradict, and  to  contradict  thirty  thousand  strong,  the  idea  that 
the  blood  and   froth,  the  fear  and  unbelief,  of  the  Industrial 


360  CROWDS 

Workers  of  the  World  represented  or  could  ever  be  supposed 
to  represent  for  one  moment  the  manhood  and  the  courage, 
the  faithfulness  and  (even  in  the  hour  of  their  extremity)  the 
quiet-heartedness,  the  human  loyalty  and  self-forgetfulness,  the 
moral  dignity  of  the  American  workingman. 

It  cannot  truly  be  said  that  the  typical  modern  labouring 
man,  whether  in  America  or  England,  is  a  coward;  that  he  has 
no  desire,  no  courage,  for  any  one  except  for  himself  and  for  his 
own  class.  Mr.  O'Connor  of  the  Dockers'  Organization  in  the 
East  of  Scotland,  said  at  the  time  of  the  strike  of  the  dockers  in 
London:  "This  kind  of  business  of  the  bureaucratic  labour 
men  in  London,  issuing  orders  for  men  to  stop  work  all  over  the 
country,  is  against  the  spirit  of  the  trades  unions  of  England. 
It  is  a  thing  we  cannot  possibly  stand.  We  have  an  agreement 
with  the  employers,  and  we  have  no  intention  of  breaking  it. " 

It  cannot  be  said  that  the  typical  modern  labourer  is  listening 
seriously  to  the  Syndicalist  or  to  the  Industrial  Worker  of  the 
World  when  he  tells  him  that  Labour  alone  can  save  itself,  and 
that  Labour  alone  can  save  the  world.  He  knows  that  any 
scheme  of  social  and  industrial  reform  which  leaves  any  class 
out,  rich  or  poor,  which  does  not  see  that  everybody  is  to  blame, 
which  does  not  see  that  everybody  is  responsible,  which  does 
not  arrange  or  begin  to  arrange  opportunity  and  expectation 
for  every  man  and  every  degree  and  kind  of  man,  and  does  not 
do  it  just  where  that  man  is,  and  do  it  now,  is  superficial. 

If  we  are  going  to  have  a  society  that  is  for  all  of  us,  it  will  take 
all  of  us,  and  all  of  us  together,  to  make  it.  Mutual  expecta- 
tion alone  can  make  a  great  society.  Mutual  expectation,  or 
courage  for  others,  persistently  and  patiently  and  flexibly 
applied  —  applied  to  details  by  small  men,  applied  to  wholes 
by  bigger  ones  —  is  going  to  be  the  next  big  serious,  unsenti- 
mental, practical  industrial  achievement.  And  I  do  not  believe 
that  for  sheer  sentiment's  sake  we  are  going  to  begin  by  rooting 
up  millionaires  and,  with  one  glorious  thoughtless  sweep,  saying, 
"We  will  have  a  new  world,"  without  asking  at  least  some  of 


MEN  WHO  GET  THINGS  361 

the  owners  of  it  to  help,  or  at  least  letting  them  in  on  good 
behaviour.  Nor  are  we  going  to  begin  by  rooting  up  trade 
unions  and  labour  leaders. 

The  great  organizations  of  Capital  in  the  world  to-day  are 
daily  engaged,  through  competition  and  experiment  and  obser- 
vation, in  educating  one  another  and  finding  out  what  they 
really  want  and  what  they  can  really  do;  and  it  is  equally  true 
that  the  great  organizations  of  labour,  in  the  same  way,  are 
are  educating  one  another. 

The  real  fight  of  modern  industry  to-day  is  an  educational 
fight.  And  the  fight  is  being  conducted,  not  between  Labour 
and  Capital,  but  between  the  labouring  men  who  have  courage 
for  Capital  and  labouring  men  who  have  not,  and  between  cap- 
italists who  have  courage  for  Labour  and  those  who  have  not. 
To  put  it  briefly,  the  real  industrial  fight  to-day  is  between 
those  who  have  courage  and  those  who  have  not. 

It  is  not  hard  to  tell,  in  a  fight  between  men  who  have  courage 
and  men  who  have  not,  which  will  win. 

Probably,  whatever  else  is  the  matter  with  them,  the  world 
will  be  the  most  safe  in  the  hands  of  the  men  who  have  the 
most  courage. 

There  are  four  items  of  courage  I  would  like  to  see  duly  dis- 
cussed in  the  meetings  of  the  trades  unions  in  America  and 
England. 

First,  A  discussion  of  trades  unions.  WTiy  is  it  that,  when 
the  leaders  of  trades  unions  come  to  know  employers  better 
than  the  other  men  do  and  begin  to  see  the  other  side  and  to 
have  some  courage  about  employers  and  to  become  practicable 
and  reasonable,  the  unions  drop  them.'^ 

Second,  Why  is  it  that,  in  a  large  degree,  the  big  employers, 
when  they  succeed  in  getting  skilled  representatives  or  man- 
agers who  come  to  know  and  to  understand  their  labouring  men 
better  than  they  do,  do  not  drop  them.'*  Why  is  it  that,  day 
by  day,  on  all  sides  in  America  and  England,  one  sees  the 
employing  class  advancing  men  who  have  a  genius  for  being 


362  CROWDS 

believed  in,  to  at  first  questioned,  and  then  to  almost  unques- 
tioned, control  of  their  business?  If  this  is  true,  does  it  not 
seem  on  the  whole  that  industry  is  safer  in  the  hands  of  em- 
ployers who  have  courage  for  both  sides  and  who  see  both  sides 
than  of  employees  who  do  not?  Does  not  the  remedy  for 
trades  unions  and  employees,  if  they  want  to  get  control,  seem 
to  be,  instead  of  fighting,  to  see  if  they  cannot  see  both  sides 
quicker,  and  see  them  better,  than  their  employers  do? 

Third,  A  discussion  of  eflSciency  in  a  National  Labour  Party 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  trend  of  national  efficiency  in 
business.  Apparently  the  most  efficient  and  shrewd  business 
men  in  England  and  America  are  the  men  who  are  running 
what  might  be  called  lubricated  industries  —  who  are  making 
their  industries  succeed  on  the  principle  of  sympathetic, 
smooth-running,  mutual  interests.  If  the  successful  modern 
business  man  who  owns  factories  is  not  running  each  factory 
as  a  small  civil  war,  is  it  not  true  that  the  only  practical  and 
successful  Labour  Party  in  England,  the  only  party  that  can 
get  things  done  for  labour  and  that  can  hold  power,  is  bound 
to  be  the  party  that  succeeds  in  having  the  most  courage  for 
both  sides,  in  seeing  the  most  mutual  interests,  and  in  seeing 
how  these  interests  can  be  put  together,  and  in  seeing  it  first 
and  acting  on  it  before  any  other  merely  one-sided  party  would 
be  able  to  think  it  out? 

Fourth,  A  discussion  of  the  selection  of  the  best  labour  leaders 
to  place  at  the  head  of  the  unions. 

Nearly  every  man  who  succeeds  in  business  notably,  succeeds 
in  believing  something  about  the  people  with  whom  he  deals 
that  the  men  around  him  have  not  believed  before,  or  in  believ- 
ing something  which,  if  they  did  believe  it,  they  had  not  applied 
or  acted  as  if  they  had  believed  before.  If,  in  order  to  succeed, 
a  business  man  does  not  believe  something  that  needs  to  be 
believed  before  other  people  believe  it,  he  hires  somebody  who 
does  believe  it  to  believe  it  for  him. 

Perhaps  Labour  would  find  it  profitable  to  act  on  this  prin- 


MEN  WHO  GET  THINGS  363 

ciple  too,  and  to  see  to  it  that  the  leaders  chosen  to  act  for  them 
are  not  the  noisiest  minded,  but  the  most  creative  men,  the 
men  who  can  express  original,  shrewd  faiths  in  the  men  with 
whom  they  have  to  deal  —  faiths  that  the  men  around  them 
will  be  grateful  (after  a  second  thought)  to  have  expressed  next. 


In  the  meantime,  whether  among  the  labourers  or  the  capital- 
ists, however  long  it  may  take,  it  is  not  hard  to  see,  on  every 
hand  to-day,  the  world  about  us  slowly,  implacably  getting 
into  the  hands  of  the  men,  poor  or  rich,  who  have  the  most  keen, 
patient  courage  about  other  people,  the  men  who  are  "good" 
(God  save  the  word!),  the  men  who  have  practical,  working 
human  sympathies  and  a  sense  of  possibilities  in  those  above 
them  and  beneath  them  with  whom  they  work  —  the  men  who 
most  clearly,  eagerly,  and  doggedly  want  things  for  others,  who 
have  the  most  courage  for  others. 

I  have  thought  that  if  we  could  find  out  what  this  courage  is, 
how  it  works,  how  it  can  be  had,  and  where  it  comes  from,  it 
might  be  more  worth  our  while  to  know  than  any  other  one 
thing  in  the  world. 

I  would  like  to  try  to  consider  a  few  of  the  sources  of  this 
courage  for  others. 


CHAPTER  XIV 
SOURCES  OF  COURAGE  FOR  OTHERS  —TOLERATION 

AFTER  making  an  address  on  inspired  millionaires  one 
night  before  the  Sociological  Society  in  their  quarters  in  John 
Street,  I  found  myself  the  next  day  —  a  six-penny  day  —  stand- 
ing thoughtfully  in  the  quarters  of  the  Zoological  Society  in 
Regent's  Park. 

The  Zoological  Society  makes  one  feel  more  humble,  I  think, 
than  the  Sociological  Society  does.  , 

All  sociologists,  members  of  Parliament,  eugenists,  professors, 
and  others,  ought  to  be  compelled  by  law  to  spend  one  day 
every  two  weeks  with  the  Zoological  Society  in  Regent's  Park. 

All  reformers  who  essay  to  make  over  human  nature,  all 
idealists,  should  be  required  by  law  to  visit  menageries  —  to 
go  to  see  them  faithfully  or  to  be  put  in  them  a  while  until 
they  have  observed  life  and  thought  things  out. 

A  Green  Bench,  The  Zoo, 
Regent's  Park,  1911. 
For  orienting  a  man  and  making  him  reasonable,  there  is 
nothing,  I  find,  like  coming  out  and  putting  in  a  day  here, 
making  one's  self  gaze  firmly  and  doggedly  at  the  other  animals. 
We  have  every  reason  to  believe  that  Noah  was  a  good 
psychologist,  or  judge  of  human  nature,  before  he  went  into  the 
ark,  but  if  he  was  not,  he  certainly  would  have  come  out  one. 
There  is  nothing  like  a  menagerie  to  limber  one  up. 
Especially  an  idealist. 

Take  a  pelican,  for  instance.  What  possible  personal  ideal 
was  it  that  could  make  a  pehcan  want  to  be  a  pelican  or  that 

S64 


COURAGE  FOR  OTHERS  —  TOLERATION   365 

could  ever  have  made  a  pelican  take  being  a  pelican  seriously 
for  one  minute? 

And  the  camel  with  his  lopsided  hump.  "Why,  oh,  why," 
cries  the  idealist,  wringing  his  hands.      "Oh,  why ?  " 

I  have  come  out  here  this  afternoon,  in  the  middle  of  my 
book,  in  the  middle  of  a  chapter  against  the  syndicalists,  but 
it  ill  beseems  me,  after  spending  half  a  day  looking  calmly  at 
peacocks,  at  giraffes,  at  hippopotamuses,  at  all  these  tails, 
necks,  legs  and  mouths,  at  this  stretch  or  bird's  eye  view  — 
this  vast  landscape  of  God's  toleration  —  to  criticise  any  man, 
woman  or  child  of  this  world  for  blossoming  out,  for  living 
up,  or  fleshing  up,  or  paring  down,  to  what  he  is  really 
Hke  inside. 

Possibly  what  each  man  stands  for  is  well  enough  for  him  to 
stand  for.  It  is  only  when  what  a  man  says,  comes  to  being 
repeated,  to  being  made  universal,  to  being  jammed  down  on 
the  rest  of  us,  that  the  lie  in  it  begins  to  work  out. 

Let  us  let  everybody  alone  and  be  ready  to  find  things  out 
just  for  ourselves. 

Here  is  this  big,  frivolous,  gentle  elephant,  for  instance, 
poking  his  huge,  inquiring  trunk  into  baby  carriages.  He  is 
certainly  too  glorious,  too  profound,  a  personage  to  do  such 
things!  It  does  seem  a  little  unworthy  to  me,  as  I  have  been 
sitting  here  and  watching  him  from  this  park  bench,  for  a 
noble,  solemn  being  like  the  elephant  —  a  kind  of  cathedral  of 
a  beast,  to  be  as  deeply  interested  as  he  is  in  peanuts. 

He  looms  up  before  me  once  more.  I  look  up  a  little  closer  — 
look  into  his  little,  shrewd  eyes  —  and,  after  all,  what  do  I  know 
about  him? 

And  I  watch  the  camels  with  the  happy,  dazed  children  on 
their  backs,  go  by  with  soft  and  drifting  feet.  Do  I  suppose 
I  understand  camels?  Or  I  follow  the  crowd.  I  find  myself 
at  last  with  that  huge,  hushed,  sympathetic  congregation  at 
the  4  P.  M.  service,  watching  the  lions  eat. 

Everything  does  seem  very  much  mixed  up  when  one  bringy 


366  CROWDS 

one's  Sociological  Society  dogmas,  and  one's  little  neat,  im- 
])eccable  row  of  principles  to  the  test  of  watching  the  lions 
eat! 

Possibly  people  are  as  different  from  one  another  inside  — 
in  their  souls  at  least  —  as  different  as  these  animals  are. 

It  is  true,  of  course,  that  as  we  go  about,  people  do  have  a 
plausible  way  in  this  world  —  all  these  other  people,  of  looking 
like  us. 

But  they  are  different  inside. 

If  one  could  stand  on  a  platform  as  one  was  about  to  speak 
and  could  really  see  the  souls  of  any  audience  —  say  of  a  thou- 
sand people  —  lying  out  there  before  one,  they  would  be  a 
menagerie  beside  which,  O  Gentle  Reader,  I  dare  to  believe, 
Barnum  and  Bailey's  menagerie  would  pale  in  comparison. 

But  in  a  menagerie  (perhaps  you  have  noticed  it.  Gentle 
Reader)  one  treats  the  animals  seriously,  and  as  if  they  were 
Individuals. 

They  are  what  they  are. 

Why  not  treat  people's  souls  seriously? 

It  is  true  that  people's  souls,  like  the  animals,  are  alike  in  a 
general  way.  They  all  have  in  common  (in  spiritual  things) 
organs  of  observation,  appropriation,  digestion  and  organs  of 
self-reproduction. 

But  these  spiritual  organs  of  digestion  which  they  have  are 
theirs. 

And  these  organs  of  self-reproduction  are  for  the  purpose  of 
reproducing  themselves  and  not  us. 

These  are  my  reflections,  or  these  try  to  be  my  reflections 
when  I  consider  the  Syndicalist  —  how  he  grows  or  when  I  look 
up  and  see  a  class-war  socialist  —  an  Upton  Sinclair  banging 
loosely  about  the  world. 

My  first  wild,  aboriginal  impulse  with  Upton  Sinclair  when 
I  come  up  to  him  as  I  do  sometimes  —  violent,  vociferous 
roaring  behind  his  bars,  is  to  whisk  him  right  over  from  being  an 
Upton  Sinclair  into  being  me.     I  do  not  deny  it. 


COURAGE  FOR  OTHERS  —  TOLERATION   367 

Then  I  remember  softly,  suddenly,  how  I  felt  when  I  was 
watching  the  lions  eat. 

I  remember  the  pelican. 

Thus  I  save  my  soul  in  time. 

Incidentally,  of  course,  Upton  Sinclair's  insides  are  saved  also. 

It  is  beautiful  the  way  the  wild  beasts  in  their  cages  per- 
suade one  almost  to  be  a  Christian ! 

Of  course  when  one  gets  smoothed  down  one  always  sees 
people  very  differently.  In  being  tolerant  the  rub  comes 
usually  (with  me)  in  being  tolerant  in  time.  I  am  tempted 
at  first,  when  I  am  with  Upton  Sinclair,  to  act  as  if  he  were  a 
whole  world  of  Upton  Sinclairs  and  of  course  (anybody  would 
admit  it)  if  he  really  were  a  whole  world  of  Upton  Sinclairs  he 
would  have  to  be  wiped  out.  There  would  be  nothing  else 
to  do.  But  he  is  not  and  it  is  not  fair  to  him  or  fair  to  the 
world  to  act  as  if  he  were. 

The  moment  I  see  he  is  confining  himself  to  just  being  Upton 
Sinclair  I  rather  like  him. 

It  is  the  same  with  Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox.  It  is  when  I  fall 
to  thinking  of  her  as  if  she  were,  or  were  in  danger  of  being, 
a  whole  world  of  Ella  Wheeler  Wilcoxes  that  I  grow  intolerant 
of  her.  Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox  as  a  Tincture,  which  is  what  she 
really  is,  of  course,  is  well  enough.     I  do  not  mind. 

The  real  truth  about  a  man  like  Upton  Sinclair,  when  one  has 
worked  down  through  to  it,  is  that  while  from  my  point  of 
view  a  class-war  socialist  —  a  man  who  proposes  to  put  society 
together  by  keeping  men  apart  —  is  wrong  and  is  sure  to  do 
a  great  deal  of  harm  to  some  people,  there  are  other  people 
to  whom  he  does  a  great  deal  of  good. 

There  really  are  people  who  need  Upton  Sinclair.  It  may 
be  a  hard  fact  to  face  perhaps,  but  when  one  faces  it  one  is 
glad  there  is  one.  Some  of  the  millionaires  need  Sinclair. 
There  are  others  whose  attention  would  be  attracted  better 
in  more  subtle  ways. 

The  class-war  socialist,  though  I  may  be  at  this  moment  in 


368  CROWDS 

the  very  act  of  trying  to  make  him  impossible,  to  put  him  out  of 
date,  has  been  and  is,  in  his  own  place  and  his  own  time,  I 
gratefully  acknowledge,  of  incalculable  value. 

Any  man  who  can,  by  saying  violent  and  noisy  things,  make 
rich,  tired,  mechanical-minded  people,  and  poor,  tired  mechan- 
ical-minded people  wake  up  enough  to  feel  hateful  has  per- 
formed a  public  service.  The  hatefulness  is  the  beginning  of 
their  being  covetous  for  other  things  than  the  things  they  have. 
If  a  man  has  a  habit  of  hunger  he  gets  better  and  better  hungers 
as  a  matter  of  course;  bread  and  milk,  ribbons,  geraniums, 
millinery,  bathtubs,  Bibles,  copartnership  associations.  And 
in  the  meantime  the  one  precious  thing  to  be  looked  out  for 
in  a  man,  and  to  be  held  sacred,  is  his  hunger. 

The  one  important  religious  value  in  the  world  is  hunger  and 
to  all  the  men  to-day  who  are  contributing  to  the  process  of 
moving  on  hungers;  whether  the  hungers  happen  to  be  our 
hungers  or  not  or  our  stages  of  hunger  or  not,  we  say  Godspeed. 

There  are  times  when  the  sudden  sense  one  comes  to  have 
that  the  world  is  a  struggle,  a  great  prayer  toward  the  sun,  a 
tumult  and  groping  of  desire,  the  sense  that  every  kind  and 
type  of  desire  has  its  time  and  its  place  in  it  and  every  kind 
and  type  of  man,  gives  a  whole  new  meaning  to  life.  This 
sense  of  a  now  possible  toleration  which  we  come  to  have,  some 
of  us,  opens  up  to  us  always  when  it  comes  a  new  world  of 
courage  about  people.  It  makes  all  these  dear,  clumsy  people 
about  us  suddenly  mean  something.  It  makes  them  all  suddenly 
belong  somewhere.  They  become,  as  by  a  kind  of  miracle, 
bathed  in  a  new  light,  wrong-headed,  intolerable  though  they 
be,  one  still  sees  them  flowing  out  into  the  great  endless  stream 
of  becoming  —  all  these  dots  of  the  vast  desire,  all  these  queer, 
funny,  struggling  little  sons  of  God ! 

It  has  been  overlooked  that  social  reform  primarily  is  not  a 
matter  of  legislation  or  of  industrial  or  political  systems,  or  of 
machinery,  but  a  matter  of  psychology,  of  insight  into  human 
nature  and  of  expert  reading  and  interpretation  of  the  minds  of 


COURAGE  FOR  OTHERS  —TOLERATION   369 

men.     What  are  they  thinking  about?     What  do  they  think 
they  want? 

The  trades  unions  and  employers'  associations,  extreme 
sociahsts  and  extreme  Tories  have  so  far  been  very  bad 
psychologists.  If  the  Single  Tax  people  were  as  good  at  being 
intuitionalists  or  idea-salesmen  as  they  are  at  being  philosophers 
in  ideas  they  Would  long  before  this  have  turned  everything  their 
way.  They  would  have  begun  with  people's  hungers  and 
worked  out  from  them.  They  would  have  listened  to  people 
to  find  out  what  their  hungers  were.  The  people  who  will  stop 
being  theoretical  and  logical  about  each  other  and  who  will 
look  hard  into  each  other's  eyes  will  be  the  people  whose  ideas 
will  first  come  to  pass.  Everything  we  try  to  do  or  say  or 
bring  to  pass  in  England  or  America  is  going  to  begin  after  this, 
not  in  talking,  but  in  listening.  If  social  reformers  and  indus- 
trial leaders  had  been  good  listeners,  the  social  deadlock  — 
England  with  its  House  of  Lords  and  railroads  both  on  strike 
and  America  with  its  great  industries  quarrelling  —  would  have 
been  arranged  for  and  got  out  of  the  way  over  twenty  years  ago. 

We  have  overlooked  the  first  step  of  industrial  reform,  the 
rather  extreme  step  of  listening.  The  most  hard-headed  and 
conclusive  man  to  settle  any  given  industrial  difficulty  is  the 
man  who  has  the  gift  of  divining  what  is  going  on  in  other 
people's  minds,  a  gift  for  being  human,  a  gift  for  treating  every- 
body who  disagrees  with  him  as  if  they  might  possibly  be  human 
too,  though  they  are  very  poor,  even  though  they  are  very  rich. 
Practical  psychology  has  come  to  be  not  only  the  only  solution 
but  also  the  only  method  of  our  modern  industrial  questions. 
Being  so  human  that  one  can  guess  what  any  possible  human 
being  would  think  is  the  one  hard-headed  and  practical  way 
to  meet  the  modern  labour  problem. 

The  first  symptom  of  being  human  in  a  man  is  his  range 
and  power  of  shrewd,  happy  toleration,  or  courage  for  peoj)le 
who  know  as  little  now  as  he  knew  once. 

A  man's  sense  of  toleration  is  based  primarily  upon  the  range 


370  CROWDS 

and  power  of  his  knowledge  of  himself,  upon  his  power  of  remem- 
bering and  anticipating  himself,  upon  his  laughing  with  God 
at  himself,  upon  his  habit  in  darkness,  weariness  or  despair,  oi 
in  silent  victory  and  joy,  of  falling  on  his  knees. 

Toleration  is  reverence.     It  is  the  first  source  of  courage 
for  other  people. 


CHAPTER  XV 
CONVERSION 

SOME  people  think  of  the  world  as  if  it  were  made  all 
through,  people  and  all,  of  reinforced  concrete,  as  if  everything 
in  it  —  men,  women,  children,  churches,  colleges,  and  parties, 
were  solidly,  inextricably  imbedded  in  it. 

Every  age  in  history  has  had  to  get  on  as  well  as  it  could  with 
two  sets  of  totally  impracticable  people,  our  two  great  orders 
of  Philistines  in  this  world,  the  people  who  put  their  trust  in 
Portland  Cement  and  the  people  who  put  their  trust  in 
Explosives. 

There  has  not  been  a  single  great  movement  in  history  yet 
that  every  thoughtful  man  has  not  had  to  watch  being  held 
up  by  these  people  —  by  millions  of  worthy,  simple,  rudi- 
mentary creatures  who  consent  to  be  mere  conservatives  or 
mere  radicals. 

One  set  says,  "People  cannot  be  converted  so  we  will  blow 
them  up. " 

The  other  set  says,  "We  are  going  to  be  blown  up,  so  let  us 
put  on  Plaster  of  Paris  as  a  garment,  we  will  array  ourselves 
before  the  Lord  in  Portland  Cement. " 

Both  of  these  classes  of  people  believe  alike  on  one  main 
point. 

They  do  not  believe  in  Conversion. 

If  the  conservatives  believed  in  conversion  they  would  not 
be  so  afraid  that  they  feel  obliged  to  resort  to  Portland  Cement. 
If  the  radicals  believed  in  conversion  they  would  not  be  so 
afraid  that  they  feel  obliged  to  resort  to  Explosives. 

In  our  machine  civilization  to  these  two  great   standard 

871 


372  CROWDS 

classes  of  scared  people,  there  has  been  added  what  seems  to  be 
a  third  class  —  the  people  who  have  responded  to  a  kind  of 
motor  spirit  in  the  time,  who  have  modulated  a  little  their 
imbelief  in  human  nature.  They  have  substituted  for  their 
reinforced  concrete  Unbelief,  a  kind  of  Whirling  Unbelief, 
called  machinery. 

They  admit  that  in  our  modern  life  men  are  not  made  of 
reinforced  concrete.  We  may  move,  but  we  move  as  wheels 
move,  they  tell  us.  We  are  whirlingly  imbedded.  We  are 
c  jgs  and  wheels  in  an  Economic  Machine. 

I  would  like  to  consider  for  a  moment  this  Whirling  Unbelief. 

There  was  a  time  once  when  I  took  the  Economic  Machine 
very  seriously. 

I  looked  up  when  I  went  by,  at  the  Economic  Machine  as 
the  last  and  the  most  terrific  of  the  inventions  among  the 
machines.  The  machine  that  mocked  all  the  other  machines, 
that  made  all  our  machines  look  pathetic  and  ridiculous, 
was  the  Economic  Machine.  There  were  days  when  I  heard 
it  or  seemed  to  hear  it  —  this  Economic  Machine  closing  in 
around  my  life,  around  all  our  lives  like  the  last  hoarse  mocking 
laugh  of  civilization. 

I  said  I  will  love  every  machine  that  runs  except  the  Economic 
Machine  —  the  machine  for  making  people  into  machines. 

But  one  day  when  I  had  waited  or  dared  to  wait,  I  know  not 
why,  a  little  longer  than  usual  before  the  Whirling  Unbelief, 
I  heard  the  hoarse  mocking  laugh  die  away.  I  became  very 
quiet.  I  began  to  think,  I  reflected  on  my  experiences.  I 
began  to  notice  things. 

I  noted  that  every  time  I  had  found  myself  being  dis- 
couraged about  people,  I  had  caught  myself  thinking  of 
people  as  Cogs  and  Wheels. 

Were  they  really  Cogs  and  Wheels.' 

Possibly  it  was  merely  the  easiest,  most  mechanical-minded 
thing  to  do  to  think  of  people  (with  all  this  machinery  around 
one)  as  cogs  and  wheels  in  an  economic  machine. 


CONVERSION  373 

Then  it  began  to  occur  to  me  that  it  was  because  I  had 
looked  upon  the  economic  machine  a  Httle  lazily,  a  little  inno- 
cently that  I  had  been  awed  and  terrified  —  and  had  been  swept 
away  with  it  into  the  Whirling  Unbelief. 

Then  I  stood  quietly  and  calmly  for  days,  for  weeks,  for 
years  before  it.     I  watched  it  Go  Round. 

I  then  discovered  under  close  observation  that  what  had 
looked  to  me  like  an  economic  machine  was  not  an  economic 
machine  at  all. 

The  modern  economic  world  has  innumerable  mechanical 
elements  in  it,  but  it  is  not  an  economic  machine. 

It  is  a  biological  engine. 

It  is  the  biology  in  it  that  conceives,  desires,  and  determines 
the  machinery  in  it. 

The  most  important  parts  of  the  machine  are  not  the  very 
mechanical  parts.     They  are  the  very  biological  parts. 

The  economic  machine  is  full  of  made-people,  but  it  does  not 
make  very  much  difference  about  the  made-people.  I  find 
that  as  a  plain,  practical  matter  of  fact  I  do  not  need  to  watch 
the  made-people  so  very  much  to  understand  the  world,  or  to 
get  ready  for  what  is  happening  to  it. 

In  prospecting  for  a  world,  I  watch  the  born  people. 

I  watch  especially  the  people  who  have  been  born  twice. 

As  one  watches  the  way  the  world  is  going  round  one  finds 
that  what  is  really  making  it  go  round,  is  not  its  being  an 
economic  machine,  but  its  being  a  biological  engine. 

Industrial  reform  is  a  branch  of  biology. 

The  main  fact  of  biology  as  regards  a  man  is  that  he  can  be 
born. 

The  main  fact  of  biology  as  regards  society  —  that  is,  the 
main  fact  of  social  biology  —  is  that  a  man  can  be  born  twice. 

As  long  as  a  man  is  born  to  go  with  a  father  and  a  mother 
it  is  well  enough  to  have  been  born  once,  but  the  moment  a 
man  deals  with  other  people  or  with  the  world,  he  has  to  be 
born  again. 


374  CROWDS 

This  is  the  main  fact  about  the  biological  engine  we  call 
the  world. 

The  main  fact  about  the  Engine  is  the  biology  in  it. 

Every  other  fact  for  a  man  has  to  be  worked  out  from  this  — 
that  is :  out  of  being  born  once  if  one  wants  to  belong  merely 
to  a  father  and  mother,  and  out  of  being  born  twice  if  one 
wants  to  belong  to  a  world. 

A  man  does  not  need  to  enter  again  into  his  mother's  womb 
and  come  out  a  child.  He  enters  into  the  World's  Womb  and 
comes  out  a  man. 


The  world  is  being  placed  to-day  before  our  eyes  in  the  hands 
of  the  men  who  are  born  twice. 

Not  all  men  are  cogs  and  wheels. 

The  first  day  I  discovered  this  and  believed  this  I  went  out 
into  the  streets  and  looked  into  the  faces  of  the  men  and  the 
women  and  I  looked  up  at  the  factories  and  the  churches  and 
I  was  not  afraid. 

I  do  not  deny  that  cogs  and  wheels  are  very  common. 

But  I  do  not  believe  that  an  economic  system  or  industrial 
scheme  based  on  the  general  principle  of  arranging  a  world 
for  cogs  and  wheels  would  work.  I  believe  in  arranging  the 
world  on  the  principle  that  there  are  now  and  are  going  to  be 
always  enough  men  in  it  who  are  born,  and  enough  who  are 
born  twice  to  keep  cogs  and  wheels  doing  the  things  men  who 
have  been  born  twice,  who  have  visions  for  worlds,  want  done, 
and  to  keep  people  who  prefer  being  cogs  and  wheels  where 
they  will  work  best  and  where  they  will  help  the  running  gear 
of  the  planet  most  —  by  going  round  and  round,  in  the  way 
they  like  —  going  round  and  round  and  round  and  round. 

But  why  is  it,  one  cannot  help  wondering,  that  the  moment 
a  man  rises  up  suddenly  in  this  modern  world  and  bases  or 
seeks  to  base  an  industrial  or  social  reform  frankly  on  courage 
for   other  people,   on  believing  in   the   inherent   and   eternal 


CONVERSION  375 

power  of  men  of  changing  their  minds,  of  being  put  up  in  new 
kinds  and  new  sizes  of  men,  in  other  words,  on  conversion  — 
why  is  it  that  clergymen,  atheists,  ethical  societies,  politicians, 
socialists  will  all  unite,  will  all  flock  together  and  descend 
upon  him,  shout  and  laugh  him  away,  bully  him  with  dead 
millionaires,  bad  corporations  and  humdrum  business  men, 
overawe  him  with  mere  history,  argue  him  with  statistics, 
and  thunder  him  with  sermons  out  of  the  world  —  if  he 
puts  up  a  faint  little  chirrup  of  hope  that  men  can  be 
converted? 

It  is  not  that  the  synods,  ethical  societies,  anarchists,  the 
bishops  and  Bernard  Shaw,  have  merely  given  up  expecting 
individual  men  to  be  converted.  There  would  be  a  measure  of 
plausibility  in  giving  up  on  a  few  particular  men's  being  bom 
again.  It  is  worse  than  that.  What  seems  to  have  happened 
to  nearly  all  the  people  who  have  schemes  of  industrial  reform 
is  that  they  have  really  given  up  at  one  fell  swoop  a  whole  new 
generation's  being  born  again.  It  is  going  to  be  just  like  this 
one,  they  tell  us,  the  new  generation  —  the  same  old  things 
the  same  old  foolish  ways  of  deceiving  the  world,  that  any 
child  can  see  have  not  worked  —  Bernard  Shaw  and  the  bishops 
whisper  to  us,  are  coming  around  and  around  again.  They 
must  be  planned  for.  All  these  young  men  of  wealth  about  us 
who  read  the  papers  and  who  are  ashamed  of  their  fathers  are 
going  to  be  just  like  their  fathers.  The  atheists,  the  socialists, 
and  the  suigle  taxers,  missionaries  and  evangelists  have  given 
up  their  last  loophole  of  hope  in  the  new  business  generation 
and  they  trust  only  to  machines  to  save  us,  or  to  professors,  or 
to  paper-treatises  on  eugenics! 

And  yet,  after  all,  if  we  were  going  to  start  an  absolute, 
decisive,  and  practical  scheme  of  eugenics  to-morrow  with 
whom  would  we  begin,  with  which  particular  people  would  we 
begin?  We  would  have  to  go  back,  Bernard  Shaw  and  the 
bishops  and  all  of  us,  to  the  New  Testament  —  to  the  old  idea 
of  being  bom  again. 


sre  CROWDS 

I  have  watched  now  these  many  years  the  professors,  caught 
in  their  culture- machines  going  round  and  round,  and  the 
priests  caught  in  their  rehgion-machines  going  round  and  round, 
and  the  business  men  caught  in  their  economic  machine,  and 
I  have  heard  them  all  saying  over  and  over  in  a  kind  of  terrible 
singsong  day  and  night,  the  silly,  lazy  words  of  a  glorious  old 
roue  four  thousand  years  ago,  "The  thing  that  hath  been  is  the 
thing  which  shall  be,  and  that  which  is  done  is  that  which  shall 
be  done  and  there  is  no  new  thing  under  the  sun. " 

There  are  some  of  us  who  do  not  believe  this.  We  defy  the 
culture-machines.  We  believe  that  even  professors  can  be  con- 
verted, can  be  educated. 

We  defy  the  bishops.  We  believe  that  business  men  can  be 
converted. 

We  defy  the  business  men.  We  believe  the  bishops  can  be 
converted. 

I  speak  for  a  thousand,  thousand  men. 

In  the  hum  and  drive  of  the  wheels  and  the  great  roar  around 
me  of  the  Whirling  Unbelief.  I  speak  for  these  men  —  for  all 
of  us.  We  are  not  cogs  and  wheels.  We  are  men.  We  are  bom 
again  ourselves.     Other  men  can  be  born  again. 

Men  shall  not  look  each  other  in  the  eyes  wisely  and  nod 
their  heads  and  say  that  human  nature  will  not  change. 

We  will  change  it.  If  we  cannot  get  but  two  or  three  to- 
gether to  change  it,  then  two  or  three  by  just  being  two  or 
three  and  by  daring  to  be  two  or  three,  or  even  one  if  necessary 
shall  change  it. 

The  moment  ninety  million  people  in  a  great  nation  have 
welded  out  a  vision  of  the  kind  of  man  of  wealth  —  the  kind  of 
employer  they  want,  the  moment  they  set  the  millionaire  in 
the  vise  of  some  great  national  expectation,  carve  upon  him 
firmly,  implacably  the  will  of  the  people,  the  people  will  have  the 
millionaire  they  want.  If  a  nation  really  wants  a  great  man  it 
invents  him.  We  have  but  to  see  we  really  want  him,  and  that 
no  other  machinery  will  work,  and  we  will  invent  him. 


CONVERSION  377 

Necessity  is  the  mother  of  invention.  Here  in  these  United 
States  sixty  years  ago  were  we  not  all  at  work  on  a  man  named 
Abraham  Lincoln?  We  had  been  at  work  on  him  for  years 
trying  to  make  him  into  a  Lincoln.  He  could  not  have  begun 
to  be  what  he  was  without  us,  without  the  daily  thought,  the 
responsibility,  the  tragical  national  hope  and  fear,  the  sense  of 
crisis  in  a  great  people.  All  these  had  been  set  to  work  on  him, 
on  making  him  a  Lincoln. 

Lincoln  would  not  have  dared  not  to  be  a  great  man,  an  all- 
people  man  with  a  whole  mighty  nation,  with  all  those  millions 
of  watchful,  believing  people  laying  their  lives  softly,  silently, 
their  very  sons'  lives  in  his  hands.  He  did  not  have  the  smallest 
possible  chance  from  the  day  he  was  named  for  President,  to 
be  a  second-rate  man  or  to  betray  a  nation,  or  to  back  down 
out  of  being  himself.  He  had  been  filled  night  and  day  with  the 
vision  of  a  great  nation  struggling,  with  the  grim  glory  of  it. 
He  was  free  to  make  mistakes  for  it,  but  there  was  no  way  he 
could  have  kept  from  being  a  true,  mighty,  single-hearted  man 
for  it,  if  he  had  tried.  We  had  clinched  Lincoln  in  1862.  He 
was  caught  fast  in  the  vise  of  our  hopes. 

Perhaps  it  is  because,  at  certain  times  in  history,  nations 
seem  to  be  siding  with  the  worst  in  their  public  men  and  ex- 
pecting the  worst  in  them  that  they  get  them. 

If  a  crowd  wants  to  be  represented,  wants  to  touch  to 
the  quick  and  kindle  the  man  in  it,  the  man  filled  with 
vision,  the  man  who  is  born  again  into  its  desire,  the 
crowd-man,  they  have  but  to  surround  him  and  over- 
shadow him.  They  will  create  him,  in  scorn  and  joy  will 
they  conceive  him,  and  before  he  knows  who  he  is,  they  will 
bring  him  forth. 

It  would  not  be  hard,  I  imagine,  to  be  a  great  man,  with  a 
true,  steadied,  colossal,  single-heartedness,  if  one  were  caught 
fast  in  the  vision,  the  expectation  of  a  great  nation. 

To  be  born  again  is  simple  with  ninety  million  people  to 
help.     We  have  all  been  born  again  in  little  things  with  a  few 


378  CROWDS 

people  to  help.  We  have  been  swung  over  from  little  short 
motives  to  big,  long-levered  controlling  ones.  We  have  known 
in  a  small  way  what  Conversion  is.  We  have  seen  how  natur- 
ally it  works  out  in  little  things. 

There  is  nothing  new  about  it.  There  is  not  a  man  who  does 
not  know  what  it  is  to  get  over  a  small  motive.  We  have  seen, 
when  we  looked  back,  what  it  was  that  happened. 

The  way  to  get  over  a  small  motive  is  to  let  it  get  lost  in  a 
big  one. 

A  man  does  not  stop  to  pick  up  a  penny  or  a  million  dollars 
when  he  is  running  to  save  his  life. 

A  man  does  not  stop  to  pick  up  two  pennies,  or  two  thousand 
dollars,  or  two  million  dollars  when  he  is  running  to  save  ten 
thousand  lives  or  running  to  save  ninety  million  lives,  when  he 
is  running  to  save  a  city  or  a  nation. 

This  is  Conversion  —  entering  into  the  World's  Womb,  the 
world's  vision  or  expectation  and  being  born  again. 


It  is  not  for  nothing  that  I  have  seen  the  sun  lifting  up  the 
faces  of  the  flowers,  and  crumbling  the  countenances  of  the 
hills.  And  I  have  seen  music  stirring  faintly  in  the  bones  of 
old  men.  And  I  have  heard  the  dead  Beethoven  singing  in  the 
feet  of  children. 

And  I  have  watched  the  Little  Earth  in  its  little  round  of 
seasons  dancing  before  the  Lord. 

And  I  have  believed  that  music  is  wrought  into  all  things,  and 
that  the  people  I  see  about  me  have  not  one  of  them  been  left 
out. 

I  believe  in  sunshine  and  in  hothouses.  I  believe  in  burning 
glasses.  I  believe  in  focusing  light  into  heat  and  heat  into 
white  fire,  and  turning  white  fire  into  little  flowing  brooks 
of  steel. 

And  I  believe  in  focusing  men  upon  men. 

I  believe  in  Conversion. 


CONVERSION  379 

Of  course  it  would  all  be  different  —  focusing  men  upon  men, 
if  men  were  cogs  and  wheels,  or  if  the  men  they  were  focused 
on  were  made  of  stones. 

I  stand  and  look  at  this  stone  and  believe  it  is  all  rubber  and 
whalebone  inside. 

But  what  of  it  ? 

It  does  not  get  true. 

While  I  am  looking  at  a  man  and  believing  a  certain  thing 
about  the  man,  it  gets  true. 

What  is  going  on  in  my  mind  while  I  look  at  him  effects 
actual  mechanical  changes  in  him,  affects  the  flow  of  blood  in 
hb  veins.  A  look  colours  him,  whitens  him,  twists  and  turns 
the  muscles  and  tissues  in  his  body.  I  draw  lines  upon  his 
inmost  being.  I  lay  down  a  new  face  upon  his  face.  A  mo- 
ment after  I  look  upon  the  man's  face  it  has  become,  as  it  were, 
or  may  have  become,  a  new  little  landscape.  I  have  seen  a 
great  country  opened  up  in  him  of  what  he  might  be  like. 
While  I  look  I  have  been  ushered  softly,  for  a  second,  into  the 
presence  of  a  man  who  was  not  there  before. 

Such  things  have  happened. 

Beatrice  looked  at  Dante  once.  Ten  silent  centuries  began 
singing. 

A  man  named  Stephen,  one  day,  while  he  was  dying,  gave 
a  look  at  a  man  named  Paul.  Paul  came  away  quietly  and 
hewed  out  history  for  two  thousand  years. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
EXCEPTION 

A  BICYCLE,  the  other  day,  a  Httle  outside  Paris  as  it  was 
running  along  quietly,  lifted  itself  off  the  ground  suddenly,  and 
flew  three  yards  and  seven  inches. 

There  are  nine  million  seven  hundred  and  eighty  nine  thou- 
sand nine  hundred  and  seventy-nine  bicycles  that  have  not 
flown  three  yards  and  seven  inches. 

But  what  of  it?  Why  count  them  up?  Why  bother  about 
them?  The  important,  conclusive,  massive,  irresistible,  crush- 
ing, material  fact  is  that  one  bicycle  has  flown  three  yards  seven 
inches. 

The  nine  million  seven  hundred  and  eighty-nine  thousand 
nine  hundred  and  seventy-nine  bicycles  that  can  not  fly  yet 
are  negligible.     So  are  nine  out  of  ten  business  firms. 

If  there  is  one  exceptional  man  in  modern  industry  who  is 
running  his  business  in  the  right  way  and  who  has  made  a  suc- 
cess of  it  and  has  proved  it  —  he  may  look  visionary  to  class- 
socialists  and  to  other  people  who  decide  by  measuring  off 
masses  of  fact,  and  counting  up  rows  of  people  and  who  see 
what  anybody  can  see,  but  he  is  after  all  in  arranging  our 
social  programme  the  only  man  of  any  material  importance  for 
us  to  consider.  It  would  be  visionary  to  take  the  past,  dump 
it  around  in  front  of  one,  and  try  to  make  a  future  out  of  it. 
I  do  not  deny  what  people  tell  me  about  millionaires  and  about 
factory  slaves.  I  have  not  mooned  or  lied  or  turned  away  my 
face.  I  stand  by  the  one  live,  right,  implacable,  irrevocable, 
prolific  exception.  I  stand  by  the  one  bicycle  out  of  them  all 
that  has  flown  three  yards  and  seven  inches.     I  lay   out  my 

3«o 


EXCEPTION  381 

program,  conceive  my  world  on  that.  Piles  of  facts  arranged 
in  dead  layers  high  against  heaven,  rows  of  figures,  miles  of 
factory  slaves,  acres  of  cemeteries  of  dead  millionaires,  going- 
by  streetfuls  of  going-by  people,  shall  not  cow  me. 

My  heart  has  been  broken  long  enough  by  counting  truths 
on  my  fingers,  by  numbering  grains  of  sand,  men,  and  moun- 
tains, bombs,  acorns  and  marbles  alike. 

Wliich  truth  matters.'* 

WTiich  man  is  right? 

Where  is  Nazareth? 


Nazareth  is  our  only  really  important  town  now.  I  will  see 
what  is  going  on  in  Nazareth.  On  every  subject  that  comes 
up,  in  every  line  of  thought,  I  will  go  to  the  city  of  implacable 
exceptions.  All  the  inventors  flock  there  —  the  man  with  the 
one  bicycle  which  flies,  the  one  great  industrial  organizer,  the 
man  with  the  man-machine,  and  the  man  —  the  great  boy  who 
carries  new  great  beautiful  cities  in  his  pocket  like  strings  and 
nails  and  knives,  they  are  all  there. 

Nazareth  is  the  city,  the  one  mighty  little  city  of  the  spirit 
where  all  the  really  worth-while  men  wherever  they  may  seem 
to  be,  all  day,  all  night,  do  their  living. 

Other  cities  may  make  things,  in  Nazareth  they  make  worlds. 
One  can  see  a  new  one  almost  any  day  in  Nazareth.  Men  go 
up  and  down  the  streets  therewith  their  new  worlds  in  their 
eyes. 

Some  of  them  have  them  almost  in  their  hands  or  are  looking 
down  and  working  on  them. 

It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  any  of  us  can  make  ourselves 
strong  and  fit  to  lay  out  a  sound  program  or  vision  for  a 
world,  who  do  not  watch  with  critical  expectation  and  with 
fierce  joy  these  men  of  Nazareth,  who  do  not  take  at  least  a 
little  time  off  every  day,  in  spirit,  in  Nazareth,  and  spend  it  in 
watching  bicycles  fly  three  feet  and  seven  inches.      To  watch 


382  CROWDS 

these  men,  it  seems  to  me,  is  our  one  natural,  economical  way 
to  get  at  essential  facts,  at  the  set-one-side  truths,  at  the 
exceptions  that  worlds  and  all-around  programs  for  worlds 
are  made  out  of.  To  watch  these  men  is  the  one  way  I  know 
not  to  be  lost  in  great  museums  and  storehouses  of  facts  that 
do  not  matter,  in  the  streetf uls  and  skyscraperfuls  of  men  that 
go  by. 

I  regret  to  record  that  professors  of  political  economy,  social 
philosophers,  industrial  big-wigs,  presidents  of  boards  of  trade 
have  not  been  often  met  with  on  the  streets  of  this  silent, 
crowded,  mighty,  invisible  little  town  that  rules  the  destinies 
of  men. 

Not  during  the  last  twenty  years,  but  one  is  meeting  them 
there  to-day, 

'All  these  things  that  people  are  saying  to  me  are  mere  history. 
I  have  seen  the  one  live  exception.  One  telephone  was 
enough.  And  one  Galileo  was  enough,  with  his  little  planet 
turning  round  and  round,  with  all  of  us  on  it  who  were 
obliged  to  agree  with  him  about  it.  It  kept  turning  round 
and  round  with  us  until  we  did. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
INVENTION 

IF  I  were  a  Noah  and  wanted  to  get  a  fair  selection  of  people* 
in  London  to  be  saved  to  start  a  new  world,  I  would  go  out 
and  look  over  the  crowd  who  are  watching  the  flying  machines 
at  Hendon,  and  select  from  them. 

The  Hendon  crowd  will  not  last  forever.  People  who  would 
be  far  less  desirable  to  start  worlds  with  would  gradually  work 
their  way  in,  but  it  is  only  fair  to  say  that  these  first  few  thou- 
sand men  and  women  of  all  classes  who  responded  to  the  flying 
machine  would  be  possessed,  as  any  one  could  see  with  a  look, 
of  special  qualifications  for  running  worlds. 

I  shall  never  quite  forget  the  sense  I  had  the  first  day  of 
the  crowd  at  Hendon  —  those  thousands  of  faces  that  had 
gathered  up  in  some  way  out  of  themselves  a  kind  of  huge 
crowd-face  before  one — that  imperturbable  happiness  on  it  and 
that  look  of  hard  sense  and  hope,  half  poetry,  half  science  .  ,  . 
it  was  like  gazing  at  some  portrait,  or  some  vast  countenance 
of  the  future  —  watching  the  crowd  at  Hendon.  Scores  of 
times  I  looked  away  from  the  machines  swinging  up  past  me 
into  the  sky  to  watch  the  faces  of  the  men  and  the  women  that 
belonged  with  sky  machines;  these  men  and  women  who  stood 
on  the  precipice  of  a  new  world  of  air,  of  sunshine,  and  of  dark- 
ness, and  were  not  afraid. 

One  was  in  a  Httle  special  civilization  for  the  time  being,  all 
the  new  people  in  it  sorted  out  from  the  old  ones.  One  felt 
a  vast  light-heartedness  all  about.  One  was  in  the  presence 
of  the  picked  people  who  had  come  to  see  this  firSt  vast  initiative 
of  man  toward  Space,  toward  the  stars,  the  people  who  had 

383 


384  CROWDS 

waited  for  four  thousand  years  to  see  it;  to  see  at  last  Little 
Man  (as  it  would  seem  to  God)  in  this  his  first  clumsy,  beauti- 
ful childlike  tottering  up  the  sky. 

One  was  with  the  people  on  the  planet  who  were  the  first  to 
see  the  practical,  personal  value,  the  market  value,  of  all  these 
huge  idle  fields  of  air  that  go  with  planets.  They  were  the 
first  people  to  feel  identified  with  the  air,  to  have  courage  for 
the  air,  the  lovers  of  initiative,  the  nien  and  women  that  one 
felt  might  really  get  a  new  world  if  they  wanted  one  and  who 
would  know  what  to  do  with  it  when  they  got  it. 


The  other  day  in  London  near  Charing  Cross,  as  the  crowds 
were  streaming  down  the  Strand,  a  heavy  box  joggled  off  over 
the  end  of  a  dray,  crashed  to  the  pavement,  flew  open  and  sent 
twenty-four  hundred  pennies  rolling  under  the  feet  of  the  men 
and  of  the  women  and  of  the  boys  along  the  street. 

TraflSc  was  stopped  and  a  thousand  men  and  women  and 
boys  began  picking  the  pennies  up.  They  all  crowded  up 
around  the  dray  and  put  the  pennies  in  the  box. 

The  next  day  the  brewer  to  whom  the  pennies  belonged  had 
a  letter  in  the  Times  saying  that  not  one  of  the  twenty-four 
hundred  pennies  was  missing. 

He  closed  his  letter  with  a  few  moral  remarks,  announced 
that  he  had  sent  the  twenty-four  hundred  pennies  as  a  kind 
of  tribute  to  people  —  to  anybody  Who  Happened  Along  the 
Strand  —  to  a  Foundling  Hospital. 


The  man  who  told  me  this  (it  was  at  a  business  men's  dinner), 
told  it  because  he  knew  I  was  trying  to  believe  pleasant  things 
about  human  nature.  He  thought  he  ought  to  encourage 
me. 

I  will  not  record  the  conversation,  I  merely  record  my  humble 
opinion. 


INVENTION  385 

I  think  it  would  have  been  better  to  have  had  just  a  few  of 
those  pennies  in  the  Strand  —  say  seven  or  eight  missing. 

On  Broadway  probably  eleven  or  twelve  out  of  twenty-four 
hundred  would  have  been  missing  ■ —  I  hope. 

And  I  am  not  unhopeful  about  England,  or  about  the  Strand. 

There  are  two  ways  to  get  rehef  from  this  story. 

First,  the  brewer  lied.  There  were  fewer  pennies  stolen 
than  he  would  have  thought,  and  when  he  figured  it  out  and 
found  just  a  few  pennies  between  him  and  a  good  story,  he 
put  the  pennies  in.  And  so  the  dear  little  foundlings  got  them 
—  the  letter  in  the  Times  said.  They  were  presented  to  them, 
as  it  were,  by  the  Good  Little  Boys  in  the  Strand. 

Second,  somebody  else  put  the  pennies  in,  some  person 
standing  by  with  a  sense  of  humour,  who  knew  the  letters 
that  people  write  to  the  Times  and  the  kind,  serious,  grave 
way  English  people  read  them.  He  put  the  pennies  grimly 
in  at  one  end,  then  he  waited  grimly  for  the  letter  in  the  Times 
to  come  out  at  the  other. 

Either  of  these  theories  would  work  very  well  and  let  the 
crowd  off. 

But  if  they  are  disproved  to  me,  I  have  one  more  to  fall  back 
upon. 

If  the  story  is  true  and  not  a  soul  in  that  memorable  crowd 
on  that  memorable  day  stole  a  penny,  it  was  because  they  had 
all,  as  it  happened  in  that  particular  crowd,  stolen  their  pennies 
before,  and  got  over  it.  It  would  seem  a  great  pity  if  there 
had  not  been  some  one  boy  with  enough  initiative  in  him, 
enough  faculty  for  moral  experiment,  to  try  stealing  a  penny 
just  once,  to  see  what  it  would  be  like. 

The  same  boy  would  have  seen  at  once  what  it  was  like, 
tried  feeling  ashamed  of  it  promptly,  and  would  never  have 
had  to  bother  to  do  it  again.  He  would  have  felt  that  penny 
burning  in  his  pocket  past  cash  drawers,  past  banks,  past  bonds, 
until  he  became  President  of  the  United  States. 

At  all  events  the  last  thing  that  I  would  be  willing  to  believe 


386  CROWDS 

is  that  either  America  or  England  would  be  capable  of  producing 
a  chance  crowd  in  the  street  that  out  of  sheer  laziness  or  moral 
thoughtlessness  would  not  be  able  to  work  up  at  least  one  boy 
in  it  who  would  have  a  sudden  flash  of  imagination  about  a 
penny  rolling  around  a  man's  leg  —  if  he  picked  it  up  and 
—  did  not  put  it  in  the  box. 

The  crowd  in  the  Strand,  of  course,  like  any  other  real  crowd, 
was  a  stew  of  development,  a  huge  laboratory  of  people.  All 
stages  of  experience  were  in  it. 

Some  of  the  people  in  the  crowd  that  day  had  a  new  refresh- 
ing thought,  when  they  saw  those  pennies  rolling  around 
everybody.  They  thought  they  would  try  and  see  what  stealing 
a  penny  was  like.     Then  they  did  it. 

Others  in  the  crowd  thought  of  stealing  a  penny  too,  and 
then  they  had  still  another  thought.  They  thought  of  not 
stealing  it.     And  this  second  thought  interested  them  more. 

Others  did  not  think  of  stealing  a  penny  at  all  because  they 
had  thought  of  it  so  often  before  had  got  used  to  it  and  had 
got  used  to  dismissing  it. 

Others  thought  of  stealing  a  penny  and  then  they  thought 
how  ashamed  they  were  of  having  thought  of  it.  Others  looked 
thoughtfully  at  the  pennies  and  thought  they  would  wait  for 
guineas. 

But  whatever  it  was  or  may  have  been  that  was  taking  place 
in  that  crowd  that  day  —  they  all  thought. 

And  after  all  what  is  really  important  to  a  nation  is  that  the 
people  in  it  —  any  chance  crowd  in  a  street  in  it  should  think. 

I  confess  I  care  very  little  one  way  or  the  other  about  the 
pennies  being  saved,  or  about  the  brewer's  little  touch  of  moral 
poetry,  his  idea  that  this  particular  crowd  was  solid  Sunday- 
school  from  one  end  to  the  other,  all  through.  Whether  it 
was  a  crowd  that  thought  of  stealing  a  penny  and  did  or  did 
not,  if  the  pennies  rolling  around  among  their  feet  made  them 
think,  made  them  experiment,  played  upon  the  initiative,  the 
individuality  or  invention  in  them,  the  personal  self-control,  the 


INVENTION  387 

social  responsibility  in  them,  it  was  a  crowd  to  be  proud  of. 
And  I  am  glad,  for  one,  that  the  box  of  pennies  was  dumped 
in  the  street. 

I  would  like  to  see  shillings  tried  next  time. 

Then  guineas  might  be  used. 

A  box  of  guineas  dumped  in  the  street  would  do  more  good 
than  a  box  of  pennies  because  there  are  many  people  who 
would  think  more  with  the  guineas  rolling  around  out  of  sight 
around  a  man's  legs  than  they  would  with  a  penny's  doing  it. 

In  this  way  a  box  of  guineas  would  do  more  good. 


Thousands  of  men  and  women  that  we  have  sent  to  India 
from  this  Western  World  have  been  trying  with  Bibles,  and 
good  deeds,  and  kind  faces,  and  Sunday-schools  to  get  the 
Hindoos  to  believe  that  it  would  not  be  a  sin  to  kill  the  rats 
and  stop  the  bubonic  plague. 

Nothing  came  of  it. 

In  due  time  General  Booth-Tucker  appeared  on  the  scene. 

He  came  too,  of  course,  with  a  Bible  and  with  his  kind  face 
like  the  others,  and  of  course,  too,  he  went  to  Sunday-school 
regularly. 

And  while  he  was  watching  the  bubonic  plague  sweeping  up 
cities,  he  tried  too,  Uke  the  others,  to  tell  the  people  about  a 
God  who  would  not  be  displeased  if  they  killed  the  rats  and 
stopped  the  plague. 

But  he  could  not  convince  anybody,  or  at  best  a  few  here 
and  there. 

The  next  thing  that  was  known  about  General  Booth- 
Tucker's  work  in  India  was,  that  he  had  (still  with  his  Bible, 
of  course,  and  with  his  kind  look)  slipped  away  and  established 
in  the  south  of  France  a  factory  for  the  manufacture  of  gloves. 

He  then  returned  to  his  poor  superstitious  people  in  India 
who  would  not  believe  him,  and  told  them  that  he  knew  and 
knew  absolutely  that  they  would  not  be  punished  for  killing 


388  CROWDS 

the  rats,  that  the  rats  were  not  sacred,  and  that  he  could  prove 
it. 

He  offered  the  people  so  much  apiece  for  the  skins  of  the  rats. 

The  poorest  and  most  desperate  of  the  natives  then  began 
killing  the  rats  secretly  and  bringing  in  the  skins. 

They  waited  for  the  wrath  of  Heaven  to  fall  upon  them. 
Nothing  happened,  then  they  told  others.  The  others  are 
telling  everybody. 

General  Booth-Tucker's  factory  to-day  in  the  south  of  France 
is  very  busy  making  money  for  the  Salvation  Army,  turning 
out  Christian  gloves  for  the  West  and  turning  out  Christians 
or  the  beginnings  of  Christians  for  the  East,  and  the  ancient, 
obstinate  theological  idea  of  the  holiness  of  the  rats  which  the 
Hindoos  have  had  is  being  ceaselessly,  happily,  and  stupen- 
dously, all  day  and  all  night,  disproved. 

Incidentally  the  little  religious  glove  factory  of  General 
Booth-Tucker's  in  the  south  of  France  is  giving  India  the  first 
serious  and  fair  chance  it  has  ever  had  to  stop  being  a  pest 
house  on  the  world,  and  to  bring  the  bubonic  plague  with  its 
threat  at  a  planet  to  an  end. 

General  Booth-Tucker's  Bible  was  just  like  anybody  else's 
Bible.  But  there  must  have  been  something  about  the  way  he 
read  his  Bible  that  made  him  think  of  things.  And  there  must 
have  been  something  about  his  kind  look.  He  looked  kindly 
at  something  in  particular,  and  he  was  determined  to  make 
that  something  in  particular  do.  He  had  the  rats,  and  he  had 
the  gloves,  and  he  had  the  Hindoos — and  he  made  them  do, 
and  before  he  knew  it  (I  doubt  if  he  knows  it  now)  he  became 
a  saviour  or  inventor. 

In  the  big,  desolate,  darkened  heart  of  a  nation  he  had 
wedged  in  a  God. 


I  wonder  if  General  Booth-Tucker  —  that  is,  the  original,  very 
small  edition  of  General  Booth-Tucker  —  had  been  in  that 


INVENTION  389 

memorable  crowd,  that  memorable  day  in  the  Strand  when 
nobody  (with  a  report  that  was  heard  around  the  world)  stole 
a  penny  —  I  wonder  if  General  Booth-Tucker  would  have  been 
A  Very  Good  Little  Boy. 

One  of  the  pennies  might  have  been  missing. 

I  have  no  prejudice  against  the  Very  Good  Little  Boy.  It 
is  not  his  goodness  that  is  what  is  the  matter  with  him.  But 
I  am  very  much  afraid  that  if  there  were  any  way  of  getting 
all  the  facts,  it  would  not  be  hard  to  prove  categorically  that 
what  has  been  holding  the  world  back  the  last  twenty-five 
years  in  its  religious  ideals,  its  business  ethics,  its  hberty, 
candour,  its  courage,  and  its  skill  in  social  engineering,  is  the 
Very  Good  Little  Boy.  He  may  be  comparatively  harmless  at 
first  and  before  his  moustache  is  grown,  but  the  moment  he 
becomes  a  grown-up  or  the  moment  he  sits  on  committees  with 
his  quiet,  careful,  snug,  proper  fear  of  experiment,  of  bold 
initiative,  his  disease  of  never  running  a  risk,  his  moral  anaemia, 
he  blocks  all  progress  in  churches,  in  legislatures,  in  directors' 
meetings,  in  trades  unions,  in  slums  and  May-fairs.  One  sees 
The  Good  Little  Boys  weighing  down  everything  the  moment 
they  are  grown  up. 

They  have  all  been  brought  up  each  with  his  one  faint, 
polite  little  hunger,  his  one  ambition,  his  one  pale  downy 
desire  in  life,  looking  forward  day  by  day,  year  by  year,  to  the 
fine  frenzy,  to  the  fierce  joy  of  Never  Making  a  Mistake. 

If  I  had  been  given  the  appointment  and  were  about  to  set 
to  work  to-morrow  morning  to  make  a  new  world,  I  would 
begin  by  getting  together  all  the  people  in  this  one  that  I  knew, 
or  had  noticed  anywhere,  who  seemed  to  have  in  them  the 
spirit  of  experiment.  Any  boy  or  girl  or  man  or  woman  that 
I  had  seen  having  the  curiosity  to  try  the  different  kinds  and 
different  sizes  of  right  and  wrong,  or  that  I  had  seen  boldly  and 
faithfully  experimenting  with  the  beautiful  and  the  ugly  so  that 
they  really  knew  about  them  for  themselves  —  would  be  let 
in.     I  would  put  these  people  for  a  time  in  a  place  by  them- 


390  CROWDS 

selves  where  the  people  who  want  to  keep  them  from  trying 
or  learning,  could  not  get  at  them. 

Then  I  would  let  them  try. 

I  would  put  the  humdrum  people  in  another  place  by  them- 
selves and  let  them  humdrum,  the  respectable  people  by  them- 
selves and  let  them  respectabilize. 

Then  after  my  try- world  had  tried,  and  got  well  started  and 
the  people  in  it  had  finished  off  some  things  and  knew  what 
they  wanted,  I  would  allow  the  humdrums  and  the  respecta^ 
bilities  to  be  let  in  —  to  do  what  they  were  told. 

Doing  what  they  are  told  is  what  they  like.  So  they  would 
be  happy. 

Of  course  doing  what  they  are  told  is  what  is  the  matter 
with  them.  But  what  is  the  matter  with  them  would  be 
useful. 

And  everybody  would  be  happy. 


When  the  Titanic  went  down  a  little  while  ago  and  those 
few  quiet  men  on  deck  began  their  duty  in  that  soft,  gracious 
moonlit  night,  of  sorting  out  the  people  who  should  die  from 
the  people  who  should  live  —  if  one  was  a  woman  one  could 
live.     If  one  was  a  man  one  could  die. 

No  one  will  quarrel  with  the  division  as  the  only  possible 
or  endurable  one  that  could  have  been  made. 

But  if  God  himself  could  have  made  the  division  or  some 
super-man  ship's  officer  who  could  have  represented  God, 
could  have  made  it,  it  is  not  hard  to  believe  that  a  less  super- 
ficial, a  more  profound  and  human  difference  between  people 
would  have  been  used  in  sorting  out  the  people  who  should 
live  from  the  people  who  should  die  than  a  difference  in  organs 
of  reproduction. 

The  women  were  saved  first  because  the  men  were  men  and 
because  it  was  the  way  the  men  felt.  It  expressed  the  men 
who  were  on  the  deck  that  night  that  the  women  should  be 


INVENTION  391 

saved  first;  it  was  the  last  chance  they  had  to  express  them- 
selves like  men  and  they  wanted  to  do  it. 

But  if  God  himself  could  have  made  the  division  with  the 
immediate  and  conclusive  knowledge  of  who  everybody  was, 
of  what  they  really  were  in  their  hearts,  and  of  what  they  and 
their  children  and  their  children's  children  would  do  for  the 
world  if  they  hved  —  no  one  would  have  quarrelled  with  God 
for  making  what  would  have  seemed  at  the  moment,  no  doubt, 
very  unreasonable  and  ungallant  and  impossible-looking  dis- 
criminations in  sorting  out  the  people  who  should  live  from  the 
people  who  should  die. 

Possibly  even  Man  (using  the  word  with  a  capital),  acting 
from  the  point  of  view  of  history  and  of  the  race  and  from  the 
point  of  view  of  making  a  kind  of  world  where  Titanic  disasters 
could  not  happen,  would  have  chosen  on  the  deck  of  the  Titanic 
that  night,  very  much  the  way  God  would. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  Man  there  would  have  been 
no  discrimination  in  favour  of  a  woman  because  she  was  a 
woman. 

The  last  cry  of  the  last  man  that  the  still  listening  life-boats 
heard  coming  up  out  of  the  sea  that  night  might  have  been  the 
cry  of  the  man  who  had  invented  a  ship  that  could  not 
sink. 

There  would  not  have  been  a  woman  in  a  life-boat  or  a 
woman  sinking  in  the  sea  who  would  not  have  had  this  man 
saved  before  a  woman. 

If  we  could  absolutely  know  all  about  the  people,  who  are 
the  people  in  this  world  that  we  should  want  to  have  saved 
first,  that  we  would  want  to  have  taken  to  the  life-boats  and 
saved  first  at  sea? 

The  women  who  are  with  child. 

And  the  men  who  are  about  to  have  ideas. 

And  the  men  who  man  the  boats  for  them,  who  in  God's 
name  and  in  the  name  of  a  world  protect  its  women  who  are 
with  child,  and  its  men  who  are  about  to  have  ideas. 


392  CROWDS 

The  world  is  different  from  the  Titanic.  We  dp  not  need  to 
Une  up  our  immortal  fellow  human  beings,  sort  them  out  in 
a  minute  on  a  world  and  say  to  them,  "Go  here  and  die!" 
"Go  there  and  live!"  We  are  able  to  spend  on  a  world  at 
least  an  average  of  thirty -five  years  apiece  on  all  these  im- 
mortal human  beings  we  are  with,  in  seeing  what  they  are  like, 
in  guessing  on  what  they  are  for  and  on  their  relative  value, 
and  in  deciding  where  they  belong  and  what  a  world  can  do 
with  them. 

We  ought  to  do  better  in  saving  people  on  a  world.  We  have 
more  time  to  think. 

What  would  we  try  to  do  if  we  took  the  time  to  think? 
Would  there  be  any  way  of  fixing  upon  an  order  for  saving 
people  on  a  world?  What  would  be  the  most  noble,  the  most 
universal,  the  most  Godlike  and  democratic  schedule  for  souls 
to  be  saved  on  —  on  a  world? 

I  think  the  man  that  would  save  the  most  other  people 
should  be  saved  first.  It  would  not  be  democratic  to  save  an 
ordinary  man,  a  man  who  could  just  save  himself,  just  think 
for  himself,  when  saving  the  man  next  to  him  instead  would 
be  saving  a  man  who  would  save  a  thousand  ordinary  men, 
or  men  who  have  gifts  for  thinking  only  of  themselves. 

Of  course  one  man  who  thinks  merely  of  himself  is  as  good 
as  another  man  who  thinks  merely  of  himself,  but  from  the 
point  of  view  of  a  democracy  every  common  man  has  an  in- 
alienable right  —  the  right  to  have  the  man  who  saves  common 
men  saved  first. 

And  the  moment  we  get  in  this  world,  our  first  democracy, 
the  moment  the  common  man  really  believes  in  democracy, 
this  aristocracy  or  people  who  save  others  (the  common  man 
himself  will  see  to  it)  will  be  saved  first. 

He  will  make  mistakes  in  applying  the  principle  of  democ- 
racy, that  is  in  collecting  his  aristocracies,  his  strategic  men, 
his  linchpins  of  society,  but  he  will  believe  in  the  principle 
all  through.     It  will  be  not  merely  in  his  brain,  but  in  his  in- 


INVENTION  393 

stincts,  in  his  unconscious  hero-worship,  in  his  sinews  and  his 
bones,  and  it  will  stir  in  his  blood,  that  some  men  should  be 
saved  before  others. 

But  if  the  world  is  not  a  Titanic,  and  if  we  have  on  the 
average  thirty-five  years  apiece  to  decide  about  men  on  a  world 
and  put  them  where  they  belong,  it  might  not  be  amiss  to  try 
to  unite  for  the  time  being  on  a  few  fundamental  principles. 
What  would  seem  to  us  to  be  a  few  fundamental  principles 
for  the  act  of  world-assimilation,  that  vast,  slow,  unconscious 
crowd-process,  that  peristaltic  action  of  society  of  gathering 
up  and  stowing  away  men  —  all  these  little  numberless  cells  of 
humanity  where  they  belong? 

No  one  cell  can  have  much  to  say  about  it.  But  we  can  watch. 

And  as  we  watch  it  seems  to  us  that  men  may  be  said  to  be 
dividing  themselves  roughly  and  flowingly  at  all  times  into 
three  great  streams  or  classes. 

They  are  either  Inventors,  or  they  are  Artists,  or  they  are 
Hewers. 

Of  course  in  classifying  men  it  is  necessary  to  bear  in  mind 
that  their  getting  out  of  their  classifications  is  what  the  classi- 
fications are  for. 

And  it  is  also  necessary  to  bear  in  mind  that  men  can  only 
be  classified  with  regard  to  their  emphasis  and  may  belong 
in  one  class  in  regard  to  one  thing  and  in  another  class  with 
regard  to  another,  but  in  any  particular  place,  or  at  any  par- 
ticular time  a  man  is  doing  a  thing  in  this  world,  he  is  probably 
for  the  time  being,  while  he  is  doing  it,  doing  it  as  an  Inventor 
(or  genius),  as  an  Artist  (or  organizer),  or  as  a  Hewer.  Most 
men,  it  must  be  said,  settle  down  in  their  classifications.  They 
are  very  apt  to  decide  for  life  whether  they  are  Inventors  or 
Artists  or  Hewers. 

But  as  has  been  said  before,  being  on  a  world  and  not  on 
a  Titanic,  we  have  time  to  think. 

On  what  principles  could  we  make  out  a  schedule  or  inven- 
tory of  human  nature,  and  decide  on  world- values  in  men? 


394  CROWDS 

When  I  was  a  boy  I  played  in  the  hollow  of  a  great  butternut 
tree  —  the  one  my  mother  was  married  under.  When  I  was 
in  college  I  used  to  go  back  to  it.  I  used  to  wonder  a  little 
that  it  was  still  there.  When  we  had  all  grown  up  we  all  came 
back  and  got  together  under  it  one  happy  day  and  there  it 
still  stood,  its  great  arms  from  out  of  the  sky  bent  over  lovers 
and  over  children  on  its  little  island,  its  wide  river  singing 
round  it,  still  that  glorious  old  hollow  in  it,  full  of  dreams 
and  childhood  and  mystery,  and  that  old  sudden  sunshine  in 
it  through  the  knots  like  portholes  .  .  .  then  we  stood  there 
all  of  us  together.  And  the  mother  watched  her  daughter 
married  under  it. 

I  can  remember  many  days  standing  beneath  it  as  a  small 
boy  (my  small  insides  full  of  butternuts,  a  thousand  more 
butternuts  up  on  the  tree),  and  I  used  to  look  up  in  its  branches 
and  wonder  about  it,  wonder  how  it  could  keep  on  so  with  its 
butternuts  and  with  its  leaves,  with  its  winters  and  with  its 
summers,  its  cool  shadows  and  sunshines,  still  being  a  butter- 
nut tree,  with  that  huge  hollow  in  it, 

I  have  learned  since  that  if  a  few  ounces  or  whittlings  of  wood 
in  a  tree  are  chipped  out  in  a  ring  around  it  under  the  bark, 
cords  of  wood  in  the  limbs  all  up  across  the  sky  would  die  in 
a  week  —  if  one  chips  out  those  few  little  ounces  of  wood. 

Cords  of  wood  can  be  taken  out  of  the  inside  of  the  tree  and 
it  will  not  mind. 

It  is  that  little  half-inch  rim  of  the  tree  where  the  juice  runs 
up  to  the  sun  that  makes  the  tree  alive  or  dead. 

The  part  that  must  be  saved  first  and  provided  for  first  is 
that  slippery  little  shiny  streak  under  the  bark. 

One  could  dig  out  a  huge  brush-heap  of  roots  and  the  tree 
would  live.  One  could  pick  off  millions  of  leaves,  could  cut 
cords  of  branches  out  of  it,  or  one  could  make  long  hollows  up 
to  the  sun,  tubes  to  the  sky  out  of  trees,  and  they  would  live, 
if  one  still  managed  to  save  those  little  delicate  pipe  lines  for 
Sap,  running  up  and  running  down,  day  and  night,  night  and 


INVENTION  395 

day,  between  the  light  in  heaven  and  the  darkness  in  the 
ground. 

Perhaps  Men  are  valuable  in  proportion  as  it  would  be  diffi- 
cult to  produce  promptly  other  men  to  perform  their  functions, 
or  to  take  their  places. 

If  we  cut  away  in  society  men  of  genius,  leaves,  and  blos- 
soms, in  trees,  men  who  reach  down  Heaven  to  us,  they  grow 
out  again. 

If  we  cut  away  in  society  great  masses  of  roots,  common  men 
who  hew  out  the  earth  in  the  ground  and  get  earth  ready  to 
be  heaved  up  to  the  sky  —  the  roots  grow  out  again. 

But  if  we  cut  a  little  faint  rim  around  it  of  artists,  of  inventive 
men-controllers,  of  the  Sap-conductors,  the  men  who  make  the 
Hewers  run  up  to  the  sky  and  who  make  the  geniuses  come  down 
to  the  ground,  the  men  who  run  the  tree  together,  who  out  of 
dark  earth  and  bright  sunshine  build  it  softly  —  if  we  destroy 
these,  this  little  rim  of  great  men  or  men  who  save  others,  a 
totally  new  tree  has  to  be  begun. 

It  is  the  essence  of  a  democracy  to  acknowledge  that  some 
men  for  the  time  being  are  more  important  in  it  than  others, 
and  that  these  men,  whosoever  they  are,  in  whatever  order  of 
society  they  may  be  —  poor,  rich,  famous,  obscure  —  these 
men  who  think  for  others,  who  save  others  and  invent  others, 
who  make  it  possible  for  others  to  invent  themselves,  these 
men  shall  be  saved  first. 


One  always  thinks  at  first  that  one  would  like  to  make  a 
diagram  of  human  nature.     It  would  be  neat  and  convenient. 

Then  one  discovers  that  no  diagram  one  can  make  of  human 
nature  —  unless  one  makes  what  might  be  called  a  kind  of 
squirming  diagram  will  really  work. 

Then  one  tries  to  imagine  what  a  flowing  diagram  would  be 
like. 

Then  it  occurs  to  one,  one  has  seen  a  flowing  diagram. 


396  CROWDS 

A  Tree  is  a  flowing  diagram. 

So  I  am  putting  down  on  this  page  for  what  it  may   be 
worth,  what  I  have  called  A  Family  Tree  of  Folks. 
Read  across : 


INVENTORS  ARTISTS  HEWERS 

Inventors Organizers Labourers 

Imagination Applied  Imagination Tool  or  Mechanism 

Fecundity Control Activity 

Seer Poet Actor 

C  The  Man    who  Sees  the^ 
<!      General    in     the    Par-  >^ 
(^     ticular J 

The    Deeper   Permanent    f  The   Immediate   ^W'^ifi'Xjjgy.ing 


Significance ■  ■  ■  1     cance  or  Meaning. 

Light.  . Applied  Light  or  Heat  Applied  Heat  or  Motion 

Stevenson  and  Watt James  J.  Hill Railway  Hands 

Creating Creative  Selecting Hewing 

Ti^  o~»' { '■  c„  witr." ..":]""  c-" 

Gods Heroes Men 

Centrifugal  Power Equilibrium Centripetal  Power 

The  Whirl-Out  People The  Centre  People The  Whirl-In  People 

Alexander  Graham  BeU.   .  .  Telephone-Vail Hands 

Architect Contractor Carpenter 

Genius Artist Workmen 

Columbus Columbus Isabella  and  the  sailors 

The  Prospector The  Engineer \Scoopers,      Grabbers      {in 

J      mind  or  body).  Hewers 

David  the  poet David  the  king David  the  soldier 

Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare 


CHAPTER  XVIII 
THE  MAN  WHO  PULLS  THE  WORLD  TOGETHER 

THE  typical  mighty  man  or  man  of  valour  in  our  modern 
life  is  the  Organizer  or  Artist. 

If  a  man  has  succeeded  in  being  a  great  organizer,  it  is  because 
he  has  succeeded  in  organizing  himself. 

A  man  who  has  organized  himself  is  a  man  who  has  built  a 
personality.  The  main  fact  about  a  man  who  has  succeeded 
in  being  an  organized  man  or  personaUty  is,  that  he  has  ordered 
himself  around. 

Naturally,  when  other  people  have  to  be  ordered  around, 
being  full-head-on  in  the  habit  of  ordering,  even  ordering 
himself,  the  hardest  feat  of  all,  he  is  the  man  who  has  to  be 
picked  out  to  order  other  people.  As  a  rule  the  man  who 
orders  himself  around  successfully,  who  makes  his  whole  nature 
or  all  parts  of  himself  work  together,  does  it  because  he  takes 
pains  to  find  out  who  he  is  and  what  he  is  like.  If  he  orders 
other  men  successfully  and  makes  them  work  together  it  is 
because  he  knows  what  they  are  like. 

A  man  knows  what  other  people  are  like  and  how  they  feel 
by  having  times  of  being  a  little  like  them  and  by  being  a  big, 
latent  all-possible,  all-round  kind  of  man. 

Leadership  follows. 

Modern  business  consists  in  getting  Inventors'  minds  and 
Hewers'  minds  to  work  together.  The  ruler  of  modern  business 
is  the  man  who  by  experience  or  imagination  is  half  an  Inventor 
himself,  and  half  a  Hewer  himself.  He  knows  how  inventing 
feels  and  how  hewing  feels. 

He  has  a  southern  exposure   toward  Hewers  and   makes 

H&7 


398  CROWDS 

Hewers  feel  identified  with  him.  He  has  what  might  be  called 
an  eastern  exposure  toward  men  of  genius,  understands  the 
inventive  temperament,  has  the  kind  of  personality  that  evokes 
inventiveness  in  others. 

Incidentally  he  has  what  might  be  called  a  northern  exposure 
which  keeps  him  scientific,  cool,  and  close  to  the  spirit  of  facts. 

And  there  has  to  be  something  very  like  a  western  exposure 
in  him  too,  a  touch  of  the  homely  seer,  a  habit  of  having  reflec- 
tions and  afterglows,  a  sense  of  principles,  and  of  the  philosophy 
of  men  and  things. 

If  I  were  to  try  to  sum  up  all  these  qualities  in  a  man  and  call 
it  by  one  name,  I  would  call  it  Glorified-commonsense. 

If  I  were  asked  to  define  Glorified-commonsense  I  would  say 
it  is  a  glory  which  works.  It  belongs  to  the  man  who  has  a 
vision  or  courage  for  others  because  he  sees  them  as  they  are, 
and  sees  how  the  glory  buried  in  them  {i.e.,  the  inspiration  or 
source  of  hard  work  in  them)  can  be  got  out. 

Everywhere  that  the  Artist  in  business,  or  Organizer,  with 
his  Inventors  on  one  side  of  him  and  his  Hewers  on  the  other, 
can  be  seen  to-day  competing  with  the  man  who  has  the  mere 
millionaire  or  ow:ning  type  of  mind,  he  is  crowding  him  from 
the  market. 

It  is  because  he  understands  how  Inventors  and  Hewers  feel 
and  what  they  think  and  when  he  turns  on  Inventors  he  makes 
them  invent  and  when  he  turns  on  Hewers  he  makes  them  hew. 

The  Hewer  often  thinks  because  he  is  rich  or  because  he  owns 
a  business,  that  he  can  take  the  place  of  the  artist,  but  he  can 
be  seen  every  day  in  every  business  around  us,  being  passed 
relentlessly  out  of  power  because  he  cannot  make  his  Inventors 
invent  and  cannot  make  his  Hewers  hew  as  well  as  some  other 
man.  The  moment  his  Inventors  and  Hewers  think  of  him, 
hear  about  him,  or  have  any  dealing  with  him  —  with  the  mere 
millionaire,  the  mere  owner  kind  of  person,  his  Inventors  invent 
as  little  as  they  can,  and  his  Hewers  hew  as  softly  as  they  dare. 

This  is  called  the  Modern  Industrial  Problem. 


MAN  WHO  PULLS  THE  WORLD  TOGETHEB   399 

And  no  man  but  the  artist,  the  man  with  the  inventing  and 
the  hewing  spirit  both  in  him,  who  daily  puts  the  inventing 
spirit  and  the  hewing  spirit  together  in  himself,  can  get  it  to- 
gether in  others. 

Only  the  man  who  has  kept  and  saved  both  the  inventing  and 
hewing  spirit  in  himself  can  save  it  in  others  —  can  be  a  saviour 
or  artist. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
THE  MAN  WHO  STANDS  BY 

I  HAVE  been  trying  to  say  in  this  book  that  goodness  in 
daily  life,  or  in  business,  in  common  world-running  or  world 
housekeeping,  is  by  an  implacable  crowd-process  working 
slowly  out  of  the  hands  of  the  wrong  men  into  the  hands  of 
the  right  ones. 

If  this  is  not  true,  I  am  ready  to  declare  myself  as  a  last  resort, 
in  favour  of  a  strike. 

There  is  only  one  strike  that  would  be  practical. 

I  would  declare  for  a  strike  of  the  saviours. 


By  a  saviour  I  do  not  mean  a  man  who  stoops  down  to  me 
and  saves  me.  A  saviour  to  me  is  a  man  who  stands  by  and 
lets  me  save  myself. 

I  am  afraid  we  cannot  expect  much  of  men  who  can  bear  the 
idea  of  being  saved  by  other  people,  or  by  saviours  who  have 
a  stooping  feeling. 

I  rejoice  daily  in  the  spirit  of  our  modern  laboring  men, 
in  that  holy  defiance  in  their  eyes,  in  the  way  they  will  not 
say  "please"  to  their  employers  and  announce  that  they  will 
save  themselves. 

The  only  saviour  who  can  do  things  for  labouring  men  is  the 
saviour  who  proposes  to  do  things  with  them,  who  stands  by, 
who  helps  to  keep  oppressors  and  stooping  saviours  off  —  who 
sees  that  they  have  a  fair  chance  and  room  to  save  themselves. 

I  define  a  true  saviour  as  a  man  who  is  trying  to  save  himself. 

It  was  because  Christ,  Savonarola,  and  John  Bunyan  were 

400 


THE    MAN  WHO  STANDS  BY  401 

all  trying  to  save  themselves  that  it  ever  so  much  as  occurred 
to  them  to  save  worlds.  Saving  a  world  was  the  only  way  to 
do  it. 

The  Cross  was  Christ's  final  stand  for  his  own  companion- 
ableness,  his  stand  for  being  like  other  people,  for  having  other 
people  to  share  his  life  with,  his  faith  in  others  and  his  joy 
in  the  world. 

The  world  was  saved  incidentally  when  Christ  died  on  the 
Cross.  He  wanted  to  live  more  abundantly  —  and  he  had  to 
have  certain  sorts  of  people  to  live  more  abundantly  with. 
He  did  not  want  to  live  unless  he  could  live  more  abundantly. 

We  live  in  a  world  in  which  inventors  want  to  die  if  they  can- 
not invent  and  in  which  Hewers  want  to  die  if  they  cannot  hew. 

I  am  not  proud.  I  am  willing  to  be  saved.  Any  saviour 
may  save  me  if  he  wants  to,  if  his  saving  me  is  a  part  of  his 
saving  himself. 

If  the  inventor  saves  me  and  saves  us  all  because  he  wants 
to  be  in  a  world  where  an  inventor  can  invent,  wants  some  one 
to  invent  to;  if  the  artist  saves  me  because  it  is  part  of  his 
worship  of  God  to  have  me  saved  and  wants  to  use  me  every' 
day  to  rejoice  about  the  world  with  —  if  the  Hewer  comes  over 
and  hews  out  a  place  in  the  world'  for  me  because  he  wants 
to  hew,  I  am  willing. 

All  that  I  demand  is,  that  if  a  man  take  the  liberty  of  being 
a  saviour  to  me  that  he  refrain  from  stooping,  that  he  come  up 
to  me  and  save  me  like  a  man,  that  he  stand  before  me  and  tell 
me  that  here  is  something  that  we,  he  and  I,  shoulder  to  shoulder, 
can  do,  something  that  neither  of  us  could  do  alone.  Then 
he  will  fall  to  with  me  and  I  will  fall  to  with  him,  and  we  wiU 
do  it. 

This  is  what  I  mean  by  a  saviour. 


CHAPTER  XX 
THE.  STRIKE  OF  THE  SAVIOURS 

A  FACTORY  in some  ten  years  ago  employed 

one  hundred  men.  Three  of  these  men  were  in  the  office  and 
ninety-seven  were  hands  in  the  works.  To-day  this  same 
factory  which  is  doing  a  very  much  larger  business  is  still 
employing  one  hundred  men,  but  thirty  of  the  men  are  em- 
ployed in  the  office  and  seventy  in  the  works. 

Ten  years,  ago  to  put  it  in  other  words,  the  factory  provided 
places  for  one  artist  or  manager  and  two  inventors  and  places 
for  ninety-seven  Hewers. 

To-day  the  factory  has  made  room  for  thirty  inventors,  one 
manager  and  twenty -nine  men  who  spend  their  entire  time  in 
thinking  of  things  that  will  help  the  Hewers  hew. 

It  has  seventy  Hewers  who  are  helping  the  Inventors  invent 
by  hewing  three  times  as  hard  and  three  times  as  skilfully  or 
three  times  as  much  as  without  the  Inventors  to  help  them, 
they  had  dreamed  they  could  hew  before. 

The  Artist  or  Organizer  who  made  this  change  in  the  factory 
found  that  among  the  ninety-seven  Hewers  that  were  employed 
a  number  of  Hewers  were  hewing  very  poorly,  because  though 
hewing  was  the  best  they  could  do,  they  could  not  even 
hew.  He  found  certain  others  who  were  hewing  poorly  because 
they  were  not  Hewers,  but  Inventors.  These  he  set  to  work  — 
some  of  them  inventing  in  the  office. 

On  closer  examination  the  two  Inventors  in  the  office  were 
found  to  be  not  Inventors  at  all.  One  of  them  was  a  fine 
Hewer  who  liked  to  hew  and  who  hated  inventing  and  the 
other  was  merely  a  rich  Hewer  who  was  an  owner  in  the  business 

402 


THE  STRIKE  OF  THE  SAVIOURS  403 

who  saw  suddenly  that  he  would  have  to  stop  inventing  and 
stop  very  soon  if  he  wanted  the  business  to  make  any  more 
money. 

There  are  four  things  that  the  Artist  has  to  do  with  a  factory 
Uke  this  before  he  can  make  it  efficient. 

Each  of  these  things  is  an  art.  One  art  is  the  art  of 
compelling  the  mere  owner,  the  man  with  the  merely  hewing 
mind,  to  confine  himself  to  the  one  thing  he  knows  how  to 
do,  namely  to  shovelling,  to  shovelling  his  money  in  when  and 
where  he  was  told  it  was  needed,  and  to  shovelling  his  money 
out  when  it  has  been  made  for  him. 

The  art  of  compelling  a  mere  owner  to  know  his  place,  of 
keeping  him  shovelling  money  in  and  shovelling  money  out 
silently  and  modestly,  consists  as  a  rule  in  having  the  Artist 
or  Organizer  tell  him  that  unless  the  business  is  placed  com- 
pletely in  his  hands  he  will  not  undertake  to  run  it. 

This  is  the  first  art.  The  second  art  consists  in  having  an 
understanding  with  the  inventors  that  they  will  invent  ways 
of  helping  the  Hewers  hew. 

The  third  art  consists  in  having  an  understanding  with  the 
Hewers  that  they  will  accept  the  help  of  the  Inventors  and  hew 
with  it.  The  fourth  art  is  the  art  of  representing  the  con- 
sumer with  the  Hewer  and  with  the  Inventor  and  with  the 
Owner  and  seeing  that  he  shares  in  the  benefits  of  all  economies 
and  improvements. 

These  are  all  human  arts  and  turn  on  the  power  in  a  man  of 
being  a  true  artist,  of  being  a  man-inventor,  a  man-developer  and 
a  man-mixer,  daily  taking  part  of  himself  and  using  these  parts 
in  putting  other  men  together. 

These  organizers  or  artists,  being  the  men  who  see  how  — 
are  the  men  who  are  not  afraid. 


CHAPTER  XXI 
THE  LEAGUE  OF  THE  MEN  WTHO  ARE  NOT  AFRAK) 

IF  ALL  the  unb rained  money  in  the  world  to-day  and  the  men 
that  go  with  it  could  be  isolated,  could  be  taken  by  men  of  imagi- 
nation and  put  in  a  few  ships  and  sent  off  to  an  island  in  the  sea 
—  if  New  York  and  London  and  all  the  other  important  places 
could  be  left  in  the  hands  of  the  men  who  have  imagination, 
poor  and  rich,  they  would  soon  have  the  world  in  shape  to  make 
the  men  with  merely  owning  minds,  the  mere  owners  off  on 
their  island,  beg  to  come  back  to  it,  to  be  allowed  to  have  a 
share  in  it  on  any  terms. 

In  order  to  be  fair,  of  course,  their  island  would  have  to  be 
a  furnished  island  —  mines,  woods,  and  everything  they  could 
want.  It  would  become  a  kind  of  brute  wilderness  or  desert 
in  twenty-five  years.  We  could,  now  and  then,  some  of 
us,  take  happy  little  trips,  go  out  and  look  them  over 
on  their  little  furnished  island.  It  would  do  us  good  to 
watch  them  —  these  men  with  merely  owning  or  hold- 
ing-on  minds,  really  noticing  at  last  how  unimportant  they 
are. 

But  it  is  not  necessary  to  resort  to  a  furnished  island  as  a 
device,  as  a  mirror  for  making  mere  millionaires  see  them- 
selves. 

This  is  a  thing  that  could  be  done  for  millionaires  now,  most 
of  them,  here  just  where  they  are. 

All  that  is  necessary  is  to  have  the  brains  of  the  world  so 
organized  that  the  millionaires  who  expect  merely  because 
they  are  millionaires  to  be  run  after  by  brains,  cannot  get  any 
brains  to  run  after  them . 

404 


LEAGUE  OF  MEN  WHO  ARE  NOT  AFRAID     405 

I  am  in  favour  of  organizing  the  brains  of  the  world  into  a 
trades  union. 

One  of  the  next  things  that  is  going  to  happen  is  that  the 
managing  and  creating  minds  of  the  world  to-day  are  going 
to  organize,  are  going  to  see  suddenly  their  real  power  and  use 
it.  The  brains  are  about  to  have,  as  labour  and  capital  already 
have,  a  class  consciousness. 

I  would  not  claim  that  there  is  going  to  be  an  international 
strike  of  the  brains  of  the  world,  but  it  will  not  be  long  before 
the  managing  class  as  a  class  will  be  organized  so  that  they  can 
strike  if  they  want  to. 

The  Artists  or  Organizers  and  Managers  of  business  will  not 
need  probably,  in  order  to  accomplish  their  purpose,  to  strike 
against  the  uncreative  millionaires.  They  will  make  a  stand 
(which  the  best  of  them  have  already  made  now)  for  the  balance 
of  power  in  any  business  that  they  furnish  their  brains  to. 
The  brains  that  create  the  profits  for  the  owners  and  that 
create  the  labour  for  the  labourers,  will  make  terms  for  their 
brains  and  will  withhold  their  brains  if  necessary  to  this  end. 
But  it  is  far  more  likely  that  they  will  accomplish  their 
purpose  sooner  by  using  their  brains  for  the  millionaires  and 
for  the  labourers  —  by  cooperating  with  the  millionaires  and 
labourers  than  they  will  by  striking  against  them  or  keeping 
their  brains  back. 

They  are  in  a  position  to  make  the  millionaires  see  how  little 
money  they  can  make  without  them  even  in  a  few  days.  They 
will  let  them  try.     A  very  little  trying  will  prove  it. 

Where  hand  labour  would  have  to  strike  for  weeks  and 
months  to  prove  its  value,  brain  labour  would  have  to  strike 
hours  and  days. 

This  is  what  is  going  to  be  done  in  modern  business  in  one  busi- 
ness at  a  time,  the  brains  insisting  in  each  firm  upon  full  control. 

Then,  of  course,  the  firms  that  have  the  brains  in  most  full 
control  will  drive  the  firms  in  which  brains  are  in  less  control 
out  of  competition. 


406  CROWDS 

Then  brains  will  spread  from  one  business  to  another.  The 
Managers,  Artists,  and  Organizers  of  the  world  will  have  formed 
at  last  a  Brain  Syndicate,  and  they  will  put  themselves  in  a 
position  to  determine  in  their  own  interests  and  in  the  interests 
of  society  at  large  the  terms  on  which  all  men  —  all  men  who 
have  no  brains  to  put  with  their  money  —  shall  be  allowed 
to  have  the  use  of  theirs.  They  will  monopolize  the  brain 
supply  of  the  world. 

Then  they  will  act.  Under  our  present  regime  money  hires 
men;  under  the  regime  of  the  Brain  Syndicate  men  will  hire 
money.  Money  —  i.  e.,  saved  up  or  canned  labour,  is  going  to 
be  hired  by  Managers,  Organizers,  and  Engineers  with  as  much 
discrimination  and  with  as  deep  a  study  of  its  efficiency,  as  new 
labour  is  hired.  The  millionaires  are  going  to  be  seen  standing 
with  their  money  bags  and  their  little  hats  in  their  hands  like 
office  boys  asking  for  positions  for  their  money  before  the  doors 
of  the  really  serious  and  important  men,  the  men  who  toil  out 
the  ideas  and  the  ways  and  the  means  of  carrying  out  ideas  — 
the  men  who  do  the  real  work  of  the  world,  who  see  things 
that  they  want  and  see  how  to  get  them  —  the  men  of  imagi- 
nation, the  inventors  of  ideas,  organizers  of  facts,  generals 
and  engineers  in  human  nature. 

It  is  these  men  who  are  going  to  allow  people  who  merely 
have  thoughtless  labour  and  people  who  merely  have  thought- 
less money  to  be  let  in  with  them.  The  world's  quarrel  with  the 
rich  man  is  not  his  being  a  rich  man,  but  his  being  rich  without 
brains,  and  its  quarrel  with  the  poor  labourer  is  not  his  being 
a  poor  labourer,  but  his  being  a  poor  labourer  without 
brains.  The  only  way  that  either  of  these  men  can  have 
a  chance  to  be  of  any  value  is  in  letting  themselves  be 
used  by  the  man  who  will  supply  them  with  what  they  lack. 
They  will  try  to  get  this  man  to  see  if  he  cannot  think  of 
some  way  of  getting  some  good  out  of  them  for  themselves, 
and  for  others. 

We  have  a  Frederick  Taylor  for  furnishing  brains  to  labour. 


LEAGUE  OF  MEN  WHO  ARE  NOT  AFRAID     407 

We  are  going  to  have  a  Frederick  Taylor  to  attend  to  the 
brain-supply  of  millionaires,  to  idea-outfits  for  directors. 

Every  big  firm  is  going  to  have  a  large  group  of  specialists 
working  on  the  problem  of  how  to  make  millionaires  —  its  own 
particular  millionaires  think,  devising  ways  of  keeping  idle  and 
thoughtless  capitalists  out  of  the  way.  If  the  experts  fail  in 
making  millionaires  think,  they  may  be  succeeded  by  experts 
in  getting  rid  of  them  and  in  finding  thoughtful  money,  possibly 
made  up  of  many  small  sums,  to  take  their  place. 

The  real  question  the  Artist  or  Organizer  is  going  to  ask  about 
any  man  with  capital  will  be,  "Is  it  the  man  who  is  making  the 
money  valuable  and  important  or  is  it  the  money  that  is  making 
this  man  important  for  the  time  being  and  a  little  noticeable 
or  important-looking?" 

The  only  really  serious  question  we  have  to  face  about  money 
to-day  is  the  unimportance  of  the  men  who  have  it.  The  Hewers 
or  Scoopers,  or  Grabbers,  who  have  assumed  the  places  of  the 
Artist  and  the  Inventor  because  they  have  the  money,  are 
about  to  be  crowded  over  to  the  silent,  modest  back  seats  in 
directors'  meetings.  If  they  want  their  profits,  they  must  give 
up  their  votes.  They  are  going  to  be  snubbed.  They  are  going 
to  beg  to  be  noticed.  The  preferred  stock  or  voting  stock  will 
be  kept  entirely  in  the  hands  of  the  men  of  working  imagination, 
of  clear-headedness  about  things  that  are  not  quite  seen,  the 
things  that  constitute  the  true  values  in  any  business  situation, 
the  men  who  have  the  sense  of  the  way  things  work  and  of  the 
way  they  will  have  to  go. 

Mere  millionaires  who  do  not  know  their  place  in  a  great 
business  will  be  crowded  into  small  ones.  They  will  be  con- 
fronted by  the  organized  refusal  of  men  with  brains  to  work  for 
their  inferiors,  to  be  under  control  of  men  of  second-rate  order. 
Men  with  mere  owning  and  grabbing  minds  will  only  be  able 
to  find  men  as  stupid  as  they  are  to  invest  and  manage  their 
money  for  them.  In  a  really  big  creative  business  their  only 
chance  will  be  cash  and  silence.     They  will  be  very  glad  at  last 


408  CROWDS 

to  get  in  on  any  terms,  if  the  men  of  brains  will  let  their  money 
edge  into  their  business  without  votes  and  be  carried  along 
with  it  as  a  favour. 

It  is  because  things  are  not  like  this  now,  that  we  have  an 
industrial  problem. 

Managers  who  have  already  hired  labour  as  a  matter  of  course 
are  going  to  hire  the  kind  of  capital  they  like,  the  kind  of  capital 
that  thinks  and  that  can  work  with  thinking  men. 

There  will  gradually  evolve  a  general  recognition  in  business 
on  the  part  of  men  who  run  it  and  on  the  part  of  managers,  of 
the  moral  or  human  value  of  money.  The  successful  manager 
is  no  longer  going  to  grab  thoughtlessly  at  any  old,  idle,  foolish 
pot  of  money  that  may  be  offered  to  him.  He  is  going  to  study 
the  man  who  goes  with  it,  see  how  he  will  vote  and  see  whether 
he  knows  his  place,  whether  he  is  a  Hewer,  for  instance,  who 
thinks  he  is  an  Inventor.  Does  he  or  does  he  not  know  which 
he  is,  an  Inventor,  an  Artist,  or  a  Hewer? 

Capitalists  will  expect  as  a  matter  of  course  to  be  looked  over 
and  to  be  hired  in  a  great  business  enterprise  as  carefully  as 
labourers  are  being  hired  now. 

The  moment  it  is  generally  realized  that  the  managers  of 
every  big  modern  business  have  become  as  particular  about 
letting  in  the  right  kind  of  directors  as  they  have  been  before 
about  letting  in  the  right  kind  of  labour,  we  will  stop  having 
an  upside-down  business  world. 

An  upside-down  business  world  is  one  in  which  any  man  who 
has  money  thinks  he  can  be  a  director  almost  anywhere,  a 
world  in  which  on  every  hand  we  find  managers  who  are  not 
touching  the  imagination  of  the  public  and  getting  it  to  buy, 
and  not  touching  the  imagination  of  labour  and  getting  it  to 
work,  because  they  are  not  free  to  carry  out  their  ideas  without 
submitting  them  to  incompetent  and  scared  owners. 

The  incompetent  and  scared  owners  —  the  men  who  cannot 
think  —  are  about  to  be  shut  out.  Then  they  will  be  com- 
pelled to  hire  incompetent  and  scared  managers.     Then  they 


LEAGUE  OF  MEN  WHO  ARE  NOT  AFRAID    409 

will  lose  their  money.  Then  the  world  will  slip  out  of  their 
hands. 

The  problem  of  modern  industry  is  to  be  not  the  distribution 
of  the  money  supply,  but  the  distribution  of  the  man-supply. 

Money  follows  men. 

Free  men.     Free  money. 


BOOK  FIVE 
GOOD  NEWS  AND  HARD  WORK 


TO   ANYBODY 

"  I  know  that  all  men  ever  born  are  also  my  brothers.     .     .     . 

Limitless  leaves  too,  stiff  or  drooping  in  the  fields, 
And  brown  ants  in  the  little  wells  beneath  them 
And  mossy  scabs  of  the  worm  fence,  heaped  stones,  elders, 

mulleins  and  poke  weed." 

A  Child  said,  "What  is  grass?"  fetching  it  to  me  with  full 
hands. 

How  could  I  answer  the  Child? 


"I  want  to  trust  the  sky  and  the  grass! 
I  want  to  believe  the  songs  I  hear  from  the  fencepostsl 
Why  should  a  maple-bud  mislead  me?" 


PART  ONE 
NEWS  AND  LABOUR 

A  BIG  New  England  factory,  not  long  ago,  wanted  to  get 
nearer  its  raw  material  and  moved  to  Georgia. 

All  the  machine  considerations,  better  water-power,  cheaper 
labour,  smaller  freight  bills,  and  new  markets  had  argued  for 
moving  to  Georgia. 

Long  rows  of  new  mills  were  built  and  thousands  of  negroes 
were  moved  in  and  thousands  of  shanties  were  put  up,  and  the 
men  and  the  women  stood  between  the  wheels.  And  the 
wheels  turned. 

There  was  not  a  thing  that  had  not  been  thought  of  except 
the  men  and  women  that  stood  between  the  wheels. 

The  men  and  women  that  stood  between  the  wheels  were,  for 
the  most  part,  strong  and  hearty  persons  and  they  never  looked 
anxious  or  abused  and  did  as  they  were  told. 

And  when  Saturday  night  came,  crowds  of  them  with  their 
black  faces,  of  the  men  and  of  the  women,  of  the  boys  and  girls, 
might  have  been  seen  filing  out  of  the  works  with  their  week's 
wages. 

Monday  morning  a  few  of  them  dribbled  back.  There  were 
enough  who  would  come  to  run  three  mills.  All  the  others  in 
the  long  row  of  mills  were  silent.  Tuesday  morning.  Number 
Four  started  up,  Wednesday,  Number  Five.  By  Thursday 
noon  they  were  all  going. 

The  same  thing  happened  the  week  after,  and  the  week  after, 
and  the  week  after  that. 

The  management  tried  everything  they  could  think  of  with 
their  people,  scolding,  discharging,  making  their  work  harder, 

413 


414  CROWDS 

making  their  work  easier,  paying  them  less,  paying  them  more, 
two  Baptist  ministers  and  even  a  little  Roman  Catholic  Church. 

As  long  as  the  negroes  saw  enough  to  eat  for  three  days,  they 
would  not  work. 

It  began  to  look  as  if  the  mills  would  have  to  move  back  to 
Massachusetts,  where  people  looked  anxious  and  where  people 
felt  poor,  got  up  at  5  a.m.  Mondays  and  worked. 

Suddenly  one  day,  the  son  of  one  of  the  owners,  a  very  new- 
looking  young  man  who  had  never  seen  a  business  college,  and 
who  had  run  through  Harvard  almost  without  looking  at  a  book, 
and  who  really  did  not  seem  to  know  or  to  care  anything  about 
anything  —  except  folks  —  appeared  on  the  scene  with  orders 
from  his  father  that  he  be  set  to  work. 

The  manager  could  not  imagine  what  to  do  with  him  at  first, 
but  finally,  being  a  boy  who  made  people  like  him  more  than 
they  ought  to,  he  found  himself  placed  in  charge  of  the  Company 
Store.  The  company  owned  the  village,  and  the  Company 
Store,  which  had  been  treated  as  a  mere  necessity  in  the  lonely 
village,  had  been  located,  or  rather  dumped,  at  the  time,  into 
a  building  with  rows  of  little  house-windows  in  it,  a  kind  of  extra 
storehouse  on  the  premises. 

The  first  thing  the  young  man  did  was  to  stove  four  holes  in 
the  building,  all  along  the  front  and  around  the  corners  on  the 
two  sides,  and  put  in  four  big  plate-glass  windows.  The  store 
was  mysteriously  closed  up  in  front  for  a  few  days  to  do  this, 
and  no  one  could  see  what  was  happening,  and  the  negroes  slunk 
around  into  a  back  room  to  buy  their  meal  and  molasses.  And 
finally  one  morning,  one  Sunday  morning,  the  store  opened  up 
bravely  and  flew  open  in  front. 

The  windows  on  the  right  contained  three  big  purple  hats 
with  blue  feathers,  and  some  pink  parasols. 

The  windows  on  the  left  were  full  of  white  waistcoats,  silver- 
headed  canes,  patent-leather  shoes  and  other  things  to  live  up  to. 

Monday  morning  more  of  the  mills  were  running  than  usual. 

Later  in  the  week  there  appeared  in  the  windows  melodions. 


NEWS  AND  LABOUR  415 

phonographs,  big  gilt  family  Bibles,  bread  machines,  sewing 
machines,  and  Morris  chairs.  Only  a  few  hands  took  their 
Mondays  off  after  this. 

All  the  mills  began  running  all  the  week. 


Of  course  there  are  better  things  to  live  for  than  purple  hats 
and  blue  feathers,  and  silver-headed  canes,  and  patent  leather 
shoes.  But  if  people  can  be  got  to  live  six  days  ahead,  or  thirty 
days,  or  sixty  days  ahead,  instead  of  three  days  ahead,  by  purple 
hats  and  blue  feathers  and  white  waistcoats,  and  if  it  is  necessary 
to  use  purple  hats  and  blue  feathers  to  start  people  thinking  in 
months  instead  of  minutes,  or  to  budge  them  over  to  where  they 
can  have  a  touch  of  idealism  or  of  religion  or  of  living  beyond 
the  moment,  I  say  for  one,  with  all  my  heart,  "  God  bless  purple 
hats  and  blue  feathers!" 


The  great  problem  of  modern  charity,  the  one  society  is 
largely  occupied  with  to-day,  is:  "What  is  there  that  we  can 
possibly  do  for  our  millionaires.''" 

The  next  thing  Society  is  going  to  do,  perhaps,  is  to  design 
and  set  up  purple  hats  with  blue  feathers  for  millionaires. 

The  moment  our  millionaires  have  placed  before  them  some- 
thing to  live  for,  a  few  real,  live,  satisfying  ideals,  or  splendid 
lasting  things  they  can  do,  things  that  everj'body  else  would 
want  to  do,  and  that  everybody  else  would  en\y  them  for  doing, 
it  will  bore  them  to  run  a  great  business  merely  to  make  money. 
They  will  find  it  more  interesting,  harder,  and  calling  for  greater 
genius,  to  be  great  and  capable  employers.  When  our  million- 
aires once  begin  to  enter  into  competition  with  one  another  in 
being  the  greatest  and  most  successful  employers  of  labour  on 
earth,  our  industrial  wars  will  cease. 

Millionaires  who  get  as  much  work  out  of  their  employees 
as  they  dare,  and  pay  them  as  little  as  they  can,  and  who  give 


416  •  CROWDS 

the  public  as  small  values  as  they  dare,  and  take  as  much  money 
as  they  can,  only  do  such  stupid,  humdrum,  conventional 
things  because  they  are  bored,  because  they  cannot  really 
think  of  anything  to  live  for. 

Labourers  whose  daily,  hourly  occupation  consists  in  seeing 
how  much  less  work  a  day  than  they  ought  to  do,  they  can  do, 
and  how  much  more  money  they  can  get  out  of  their  employers 
than  they  earn,  only  do  such  things  because  they  are  tired  or 
bored  and  discouraged,  and  because  they  cannot  think  of  any- 
thing that  is  truly  big  and  fine  and  worth  working  for. 

The  industrial  question  is  not  an  economic  question.  It 
is  a  question  of  supplying  a  nation  with  ideals.  It  is  a  problem 
which  only  an  American  National  Ideal  Supply  Company  could 
hope  to  handle.  The  very  first  moment  three  or  four  purple  hats 
with  blue  feathers  for  millionaires  and  for  labourers  have  been 
found  and  set  up  in  the  great  show  window  of  the  world,  the 
industrial  unrest  of  this  century  begins  to  end. 


As  I  went  by,  one  day  not  long  ago,  I  saw  two  small  boys 
playing  house  —  marking  off  rooms  —  sitting-rooms  and  bed- 
rooms, with  rows  of  stones  on  the  ground.  When  I  came  up 
they  had  just  taken  hold  of  a  big  stone  they  wanted  to  lift  over 
into  line  a  little.  They  were  tugging  on  it  hopefully  and  with 
very  red  faces,  and  it  did  not  budge.  I  picked  up  a  small  beam 
about  five  feet  long  on  my  side  of  the  road,  that  I  thought 
would  do  for  a  crowbar,  stepped  over  to  the  boys,  fixed  a  fulcrum 
for  them,  and  went  on  with  my  walk.  When  I  came  back 
after  my  walk  that  night  to  the  place  where  the  boys  had  been 
playing,  I  found  the  boys  had  given  up  working  on  their  house. 
And  as  I  looked  about,  every  big  stone  for  yards  around  —  every 
one  that  was  the  right  size  —  seemed  subtly  out  of  place.  The 
top  of  the  stone  wall,  too,  was  very  crooked. 

They  had  given  up  playing  house  and  had  played  crowbar 
all  day  instead. 


NEWS  AND  LABOUR  417 

I  should  think  it  would  have  been  a  rather  wonderful  day, 
those  boys'  first  day,  seven  or  eight  hours  of  it  spent,  with  just 
a  little  time  off  for  luncheon,  in  seeing  how  a  crowbar  worked ! 

I  have  forgotten  just  how  much  larger  part  of  a  ton  one  inch 
more  on  a  crowbar  lifts.  I  never  know  figures  very  well.  But 
I  know  people  and  I  know  that  a  man  with  only  three  day's 
worth  of  things  ahead  to  live  for  does  not  get  one  hundredth 
part  of  the  purchase  power  on  what  he  is  doing  that  the  man  gets 
who  works  with  thirty  days  ahead  of  things  to  live  for,  all  of 
them  nerving  him  up,  keeping  him  in  training, and  inspiring  him. 
And  I  know  that  the  man  who  does  his  work  with  a  longer 
lever  still,  with  thirty  or  forty  years  worth'  of  things  he  wants, 
all  crowding  in  upon  him  and  backing  him  up,  can  lift  things 
so  easily,  so  even  jauntily,  sometimes,  that  he  seems  to  many 
of  us  sometimes  to  be  a  new  size  and  a  new  kind  of  man. 


The  general  conventional  idea  of  business  is,  that  if  yougive  a 
man  more  wages  to  work  for,  he  will  work  more,  but  of  course  if 
a  business  man  has  the  brains,  knows  how  to  fire  up  an  employee, 
knows  how  to  give  him  something  or  suggest  something  in  his  life 
that  will  make  him  want  to  live  twenty  times  as  much,  it  would 
not  only  be  cheaper,  but  it  would  work  better  than  paying  him 
twice  as  much  wages. 

Efficiency  is  based  on  news.  Put  before  a  man's  life  twenty 
times  as  much  to  live  for  and  to  work  for,  and  he  wiU  do  at  least, 
well  —  twice  as  much  work. 

If  a  man  has  a  big  man's  thing  or  object  in  view,  he  can  do 
three  times  as  much  work.  If  the  little  thing  he  has  to  do,  and 
keep  doing,  is  seen  daily  by  him  as  a  part  of  a  big  thing,  the 
power  and  drive  of  the  big  thing  is  in  it,  the  little  thing  becomes 
the  big  thing,  seems  big  while  he  is  doing  it  everj"  minute.  It 
makes  it  easier  to  do  it  because  it  seems  big. 

The  little  man  becomes  a  big  man. 

From  the  plain,  practical  point  of  view,  it  is  the  idealist  in 


418  CROWDS 

business,  the  shrewd,  accurate,  patient  idealist  in  modem  busi- 
ness who  is  the  man  of  economic  sense.  The  employer  who  can 
put  out  ideals  in  front  of  his  people,  who  can  make  his  people 
efficient  with  the  least  expense,  is  the  employer  who  has  the 
most  economic  sense. 

The  employer  who  is  a  master  at  supplying  motives  to  people, 
who  manages  to  cut  down  through  to  the  quick  in  his  employees, 
to  the  daily  motives,  to  the  hourly  ideals,  the  hourly  expecta- 
tions with  which  they  work,  is  the  employer  who  already  takes 
the  lead,  who  is  already  setting  the  pace  in  the  twentieth-century 
business  world. 

Possibly  you  have  noticed  this  trait  in  the  great  employers 
or,  at  least,  in  the  great  managers  of  employers  ? 

You  are  going,  for  instance,  through  a  confectionery  shop. 
As  you  move  down  the  long  aisles  of  candy  machines  you  hear 
the  clock  strike  eleven.  Suddenly  music  starts  up  all  around  you 
and  before  your  eyes  four  hundred  girls  swing  off  into  each 
other's  arms.  They  dance  between  their  machines  five  min- 
utes, and  then,  demurely,  they  drop  back  to  their  work.  You 
see  them  sitting  quietly  in  long  white  rows,  folding  up  sweet- 
meats with  flushed  and  glowing  cheeks. 

Is  this  sentiment  or  is  it  cold  businesslike  efficiency.'' 

The  more  sentiment  there  is  in  it,  I  think,  the  more  efficient 
it  is  and  the  better  it  works. 

"Business  is  not  business." 

One  need  not  quarrel  about  words,  but  certainly,  whatever 
else  business  is,  it  is  not  business.  It  would  be  closer  to  the 
facts  to  call  business  an  art  or  a  religion,  a  kind  of  homely, 
inspired,  applied  piety,  based  upon  gifts  in  men  which  are 
essentially  religious  gifts;  the  power  of  communion  in  the  human 
heart,  the  genius  for  cultivating  companionship,  of  getting 
people  to  understand  you  and  understand  one  another  and  do 
team  work.  The  bed-rock,  the  hard  pan  of  business  success 
lies  in  the  fundamental,  daily  conviction  —  the  personal 
habit    in  a    man    of   looking   upon   business   as  a  hard,  ac- 


NEWS  AND  LABOUR  419 

curate,  closely  studied,  shrewd  human  art,  a  science  of  mutual 
expectation. 

I  am  not  saying  that  I  would  favour  all  employers  of  young 
women  having  them,  to-morrow  morning  at  eleven  o'clock, 
swing  off  into  each  other's  arms  and  dance  for  five  minutes.  The 
value  of  the  dance  in  this  particular  case  was  that  the  Firm 
thought  of  the  dancing  itself  and  was  always  doing  things  like 
it,  that  everybody  knew  that  the  Firm,  up  in  its  glass  office,  felt 
glad,  joined  in  the  dance  in  spirit,  enjoyed  seeing  the  girls  caught 
up  for  five  minutes  in  the  joy  and  swing  of  a  big  happy  world 
full  of  sunshine  and  music  outside,  full  of  buoyant  and  gentle 
things,  of  ideals  around  them  which  belonged  to  them  and  of 
which  they  and  their  lives  were  a  part. 

When  we  admit  that  business  success  to-day  turns  or  is  begin- 
ning to  turn  on  a  man's  power  of  getting  work  out  of  people,  we 
admit  that  a  man's  power  of  getting  work  out  of  people,  his 
business  efficiency,  turns  on  his  power  of  supplying  his  people 
with  ideals. 

Ideals  are  news. 

You  come  on  a  man  who  thinks  he  is  out  of  breath  and  that 
he  cannot  possibly  run.  You  happen  to  be  able  to  tell  him 
that  some  dynamite  in  the  quarry  across  the  road  is  going  to 
blow  the  side  of  the  hill  out  in  forty-five  seconds  and  he  will 
run  like  a  gazelle. 

You  tell  a  man  the  news,  the  true  news  that  his  employers  are 
literally  and  honestly  finding  increased  pay  or  promotion, 
either  in  their  own  establishment  or  elsewhere  for  every  man 
they  employ,  as  fast  as  he  makes  himself  fit,  and  you  have 
created  a  man  three  times  his  own  size  before  your  own  eyes,  all 
in  a  minute.  And  he  begins  working  for  you  like  a  man  three 
times  his  own  size,  and  not  because  he  is  getting  more  for  it,  but 
because  he  suddenly  believes  in  you,  suddenly  believes  in  the 
world  and  in  the  human  race  he  belongs  to. 

To  make  a  man  work,  say  something  to  him  or  do  something 
to  him  which  will  make  him  swing  his  hat  for  humanity,  and 


420  CROWDS 

give  three  cheers  (Hke  a  meeting  of  workmen  the  other  day) : 
"Three  cheers  for  God!" 

There  is  a  well-known  firm  in  England  which  has  the  best 
labour  of  its  kind  in  the  world,  because  the  moment  the  Firm 
finds  that  a  man's  skill  has  reached  the  uttermost  point  in  his 
work,  where  it  would  be  to  the  Firm's  immediate  interests  to 
keep  him  and  where  the  Firm  could  keep  on  making  money  out 
of  him  and  where  the  man  could  not  keep  on  growing,  they  have 
a  way  of  stepping  up  to  such  a  man  (and  such  things  happen 
every  few  days),  and  telling  him  that  he  ought  to  go  elsewhere, 
finding  him  a  better  place  and  sending  him  to  it.  This  is  a 
regular  system  and  highly  organized.  The  factory  is  known  or 
looked  upon  as  a  big  family  or  school.  There  are  hundreds  of 
young  men  and  young  women  who,  in  order  to  get  in  and  get 
started,  and  merely  be  on  the  premises  of  such  a  factory,  would 
offer  to  work  for  the  firm  for  nothing.  The  Factory,  to  them,  is 
like  a  great  Gate  on  the  World. 

It  is  its  ideals  that  have  made  the  factory  a  great  gate  on 
the  World. 

And  ideals  are  news.     Ideals  are  news  to  a  man  about  himself. 

News  to  a  man  about  himself  and  about  what  he  can  be,  is 
gospel. 

And  a  factory  with  men  at  the  top  who  have  the  brains  about 
human  nature  to  do  things  like  this,  men  who  can  tell  people 
news  about  themselves,  all  day,  every  day,  all  the  week,  like  a 
church  —  let  such  a  factory,  I  say,  for  one,  have  a  steeple 
with  chimes  in  it,  if  it  wants  to,  and  be  counted  with  the  other 
churches ! 

People  have  a  fashion  of  speaking  of  a  man's  ideals  in  a  kind 
of  weak,  pale  way,  as  if  ideals  were  clouds,  done  in  water-colour 
by  schoolgirls,  as  if  they  were  pretty,  innocent  things,  instead 
of  being  fierce,  splendid,  terrific  energies,  victorious,  irrevocable 
in  human  history,  trampling  the  earth  like  unicorns,  breathing 
wonder,  deaths,  births  upon  the  world,  carrying  everything 
before  them,  everywhere  they  go.     These  are  ideals!     This 


NEWS  AND  LABOim  421 

may  not  be  the  way  ideals  work  in  a  moment  or  in  a  year,  but 
it  is  the  way  they  work  in  history,  and  it  is  the  way  they  make 
a  man  feel  when  he  is  working  on  them.  It  is  what  they  are  for, 
to  make  him  feel  like  this,  when  he  is  working  on  them.  With 
the  men  who  are  most  alive  and  who  live  the  longest,  the  men 
who  live  farther  ahead  and  think  in  longer  periods  of  time,  the 
energies  in  ideals  function  as  an  everyday  matter  of  course. 

I  wish  people  would  speak  oftener  of  a  man's  motives,  what 
he  lives  for,  as  his  motive  powers.  They  generally  speak  of 
motives  in  a  man  as  if  they  were  a  mere  kind  of  dead  chart  or 
spiritual  geography  in  him,  or  clock-hand  on  him  or  map  of  his 
soul.  The  motives  and  desires  in  a  man  are  the  motors  or 
engines  in  him,  the  central  power  house  in  a  man,  the  thing 
in  him  that  makes  him  go. 

All  a  man  has  to  do  to  live  suddenly  and  unexpectedly  a  big 
life  is  to  have  suddenly  a  big  motive. 

Anybody  who  has  ever  tried,  for  five  minutes,  a  big  motive, 
ever  tried  working  a  Uttle  happiness  for  other  people  into  what 
he  is  doing  for  himself,  for  instance,  if  he  stopped  to  think 
about  it  and  how  it  worked  and  how  happy  it  made  him  himself, 
would  never  do  anything  in  any  other  way  all  his  life.  It  is 
the  big  motives  that  are  efficient. 


PART  TWO 
NEWS  AND  MONEY 

I  THINK  it  was  Sir  William  Lever  who  remarked  (but  I 
have  heard  in  the  last  two  years  so  many  pearls  dropped  from 
the  lips  of  millionaires  that  I  am  not  quite  sure)  that  the 
way  to  tell  a  millionaire,  when  one  saw  one,  was  by  his  lack 
of  ready  money.  He  added  that  perhaps  a  surer  way 
of  knowing  a  millionaire,  when  one  saw  one,  was  by  his  lack  of 
ideas. 

My  own  experience  is  that  neither  of  these  ways  works  as 
well  as  it  used  to.  I  very  often  meet  a  man  now  —  a  real  live 
millionaire,  no  one  would  think  it  of. 

One  of  them  —  one  of  the  last  ones  —  telegraphed  me  from 
down  in  the  country  one  morning,  swung  up  to  London  on  a 
quick  train,  cooped  me  up  with  him  at  a  little  corner  table  in 
his  hotel,  and  gave  me  more  ideas  in  two  hours  than  I  had 
had  in  a  week. 

I  came  away  very  curious  about  him  —  whoever  he  was. 

Not  many  days  afterward  I  found  myself  motoring  up  a  long, 
slow  hill,  full  of  wind  and  heather,  and  there  in  a  stately  park 
with  all  his  treetops  around  him,  and  his  own  blue  sky,  in  a  big, 
beautiful,  serene  room,  I  saw  him  again. 

He  began  at  once,  "  Do  you  think  Christ  would  have  approved 
of  my  house?" 

His  five  grown  sons  were  sitting  around  him  but  he  spoke 
vividly  and  directly  and  like  a  child,  and  as  if  he  had  just 
brushed  sixty  years  away,  and  could,  any  time. 

I  said  I  did  not  think  it  fair  to  Christ,  two  thousand  years  off, 
to  ask  what  he  would  have  thought  of  a  house  like  his,  now 

422 


NEWS  AND  MONEY  423 

The  only  fair  thing  to  do  would  be  to  ask  what  Christ  would 
think  if  He  were  living  here  to-day. 

"Well,  suppose  He  had  motored  over  here  with  you  this 

afternoon  from Manor,  and  spent  last  night  with  you 

there,  and  talked  with  you  and  with and  had  seen  the 

pictures,  and  the  great  music  room  and  wandered  through  the 
gardens,  and  suppose  that  then  He  had  come  through  on  his 

way  up,  all  those  two  miles  of  slums  down  in seen  all 

those  poor,  driven,  crowded  people,  and  had  finally  come  up 
here  with  you  to  this  big,  still,  restful  place  two  thousand  people 
could  live  in,  and  which  I  keep  all  to  myself.  You  don't  really 
mean  to  say,  do  you,  that  He  would  approve  of  my  living  in  a 
house  like  this.''" 

I  said  that  I  did  not  think  that  Christ  would  be  tipped  over 
by  a  house  or  lose  his  bearings  with  a  human  soul  because  he 
lived  in  a  park.  I  thought  He  would  look  him  straight  in 
the  eyes. 

"But  Christ  said,  'He  that  loseth  his  life  shall  save  it!'  " 

"Yes,  but  He  did  not  intend  it  as  a  mere  remark  about 
people's  houses." 

It  did  not  seem  to  me  that  Christ  meant  simply  giving  up 
to  other  people  easy  and  ordinary  things  like  houses  or  like 
money,  but  that  He  meant  giving  up  to  others  our  motives, 
giving  up  the  deepest,  hardest  things  in  us,  our  very  selves  to 
other  people. 

"And  so  you  really  think  that  if  Christ  came  and  looked  at 
this  house  and  looked  at  me  in  it.  He  would  not  mind.' " 

"I  do  not  know.  I  think  that  after  He  had  looked  at  your 
house  He  would  go  down  and  look  at  your  factory,  possibly. 
How  many  men  do  you  employ?  " 

"  Sixteen  hundred. " 

"I  think  He  would  look  at  them,  the  sixteen  hundred  men, 
and  then  He  would  move  about  a  little.  Very  likely  He  would 
look  at  their  wives  and  the  little  children. " 

He  thought  a  moment.     I  could  see  that  he  was  not  as  afraid 


424  CROWDS 

of  having  Christ  see  the  factory  as  he  was  of  having  Him  see 
the  house. 

I  was  not  quite  sure  but  I  thought  there  was  a  Uttle  faint 
gleam  in  his  eye  when  I  mentioned  the  factory. 

"What  do  you  make?"  I  asked. 

He  named  something  that  everybody  knows. 

Then  I  remembered  suddenly  who  he  was.  He  was  one  of  the 
men.I  had  first  been  told  about  in  England,  and  the  name  had 
slipped  from  me.  He  had  managed  to  do  and  do  together  the 
three  things  one  goes  about  looking  for  everywhere  in  business 
—  what  might  be  called  the  Three  R's  of  great  business  (though 
not  necessarily  R's).  (1)  He  had  raised  the  wages  of  his 
employees.  (2)  He  had  reduced  prices  to  consumers.  (3) 
He  had  reduced  his  proportion  of  profit  and  raised  the  income 
of  the  works,  by  inventing  new  classes  of  customers,  and  in- 
creasing the  volume  of  the  business. 

He  had  found  himself,  one  day,  as  most  men  do,  sooner  or 
later,  with  a  demand  for  wages  that  he  could  not  pay. 

At  first  he  told  the  men  he  could  not  pay  them  more,  said  that 
he  would  have  to  close  the  works  if  he  did. 

He  was  a  very  busy  man  to  be  confronted  with  a  crisis  like 
this.     The  market  was  trouble  enough. 

One  morning,  when  he  was  up  early,  and  the  house  was  all 
still  and  he  was  sitting  alone  with  himself,  the  thought  slipped 
into  his  mind  that  there  had  been  several  times  before  in  his  life 
when  he  had  sat  thinking  about  certain  things  that  could  not  be 
done.  And  then  he  had  got  up  from  thinking  they  could  not 
be  done  and  gone  out  and  done  them 

He  wondered  if  he  could  not  get  up  and  go  out  and  do  this 
one. 

As  he  sat  in  the  stillness  with  a  clear  road  before  his  mind 
and  not  a  soul  in  the  world  up,  the  thought  occurred  to  him, 
with  not  a  thing  in  sight  to  stop  it,  that  he  had  not  really  trained 
himself  to  be  quite  such  an  expert  in  raising  wages  as  he  had  in 
some  other  things. 


NEWS  AND  MONEY  425 

Perhaps  he  did  not  know  about  raising  wages. 

Perhaps  if  he  concentrated  his  imagination  as  much  on  getting 
higher  wages  for  his  workmen  as  he  had  in  those  early  days 
years  before  on  making  over  all  his  obstinate  raw  material  into 

the  best  cases  of on  earth,  he  might  find  it  possible  to 

get  more  wages  for  his  men  by  persuading  them  to  earn  more 
and  by  getting  their  cooperation  in  finding  ways  to  earn  more. 

As  he  sat  in  the  stillness,  gradually  (perhaps  it  was  the 
stillness  that  did  it)  the  idea  grew  on  him. 

He  made  up  his  mind  to  see  what  would  happen  if  he  worked 
as  hard  at  paying  higher  wages  for  three  months  as  he  had  for 

three  years  at  making  raw  material  into  cases  of  the  best 

on  earth. 

Then  things  began  happening  every  day.  One  of  the  most 
important  happened  to  him. 

He  found  that  higher  wages  were  ag  interesting  a  thing  to 
work  on  as  any  other  raw  material  had  ever  been. 

He  found  that  a  cheap  workman  as  raw  material  to  make  a 
high-priced  workman  out  of  was  as  interesting  as  a  case  of 

A  year  or  so  after  this,  there  was  a  strike  (in  his  particular 
industry)  of  all  the  workmen  in  England.  They  struck  to  be 
paid  the  wages  his  men  were  paid. 

He  had  been  able  to  do  three  things  he  thought  he  thought 
he  could  not  do.  He  had  succeeded  in  doing  the  first,  in  raising 
the  wages  of  his  employees,  by  thinking  up  original  ways  of 
expressing  himself  to  them,  and  of  getting  them  to  beUeve  in 
him  and  of  making  them  want  to  work  a  third  harder.  At  the 
same  time  he  succeeded  in  doing  the  second,  in  reducing  the 
prices  to  consumers,  by  inventing  new  by-products  out  of  waste. 

He  had  succeeded  in  doing  the  third,  in  reducing  his  per  cent,  of 
profits  and  increasing  his  income  from  the  works  at  the  same 
time,  by  thinking  up  ways  of  creating  new  habits  and  new  needs 
in  his  customers. 

He  had  fulfilled,  as  it  seems,  the  three  requisites  of  a  great 
business  career.     He  had  created  new  workmen,  invented  new 


426  CROWDS 

things  for  men  and  women  to  want,  and  had  then  created 
some  new  men  and  women  who  could  want  them. 

Incidentally  all  the  while,  day  by  day,  while  he  was  doing 
these  things,  he  had  distributed  a  large  and  more  or  less  un- 
expected sum  of  money  among  all  these  three  classes  of  people. 

Some  of  this  extra  money  went  to  his  workmen,  and  some  to 
himself,  and  some  to  his  customers,  but  it  was  largely  spent,  of 
course,  in  getting  business  for  other  manufacturers  and  in  getting 
people  to  buy  all  over  England,  from  other  manufacturers,  things 
that  such  people  as  they  had  never  been  able  before  to  afford 
to  buy. 


All  these  things  that  I  have  been  saying  and  which  I  have  duly 
confided  to  the  reader  flashed  through  my  mind  as  I  stood  with 
my  back  to  the  fire,  realizing  suddenly  that  the  man  who  had 
done  them  was  the  man  with  whom  I  was  talking. 

Possibly  some  little  thing  was  said.  I  do  not  remember  what. 
The  next  thing  I  knew  v/as  that,  with  his  five  grown  sons 
around  him,  he  returned  to  his  attack  on  his  house. 

He  said  some  days  he  was  glad  it  was  so  far  away.  He  did 
not  want  his  workmen  to  see  it.  He  did  not  go  to  the  mill 
often  in  his  motor-car,  not  when  he  could  help  it. 

I  said  that  I  thought  that  a  man  who  was  doing  extra- 
ordinary things  for  other  people,  things  that  other  men  could 
not  get  time  or  strength  or  freedom  or  boldness  of  mind  or 
initiative  to  do,  that  any  particular  thing  he  could  have  that 
gave  him  any  advantage  or  immunity  for  doing  the  extraordin- 
ary things  better,  that  would  give  him  more  of  a  chance  to  give 
other  people  a  chance,  that  the  other  people,  if  they  were  in  their 
senses,  would  insist  upon  his  having  these  things. 

"  I  think  there  are  hundreds  of  men  in  my  mill  who  think  that 
they  ought  to  have  my  motor-car  and  three  or  four  rooms  in 
this  house." 

"Are  they  the  most  eflBcient  ones?" 


NEWS  AND  MONEY  427 

"  No." 

If  a  man  gives  over  to  other  people  his  deepest  motives, 
and  if  he  really  identifies  himself  —  the  very  inside  of  himself 
with  them  and  treats  their  interests  as  his  interests,  the  more 
money  he  has,  the  more  people  like  it. 

"  Take  me,  for  instance,"  I  said. 

"  I  have  hoped  every  minute  since  I  knew  you,  that  you 
were  a  prosperous  man.  I  saw  the  house  and  looked  around  in 
the  park  as  I  motored  up  with  joy.  And  when  I  came  to  the 
big  gate  I  wanted  to  give  three  cheers!  I  wish  you  had  stock 
in  the  Meat  Trust  in  America,  that  you  could  pierce  your  way 
like  a  microbe  into  the  vitals,  into  the  inside  of  the  Meat  Trust 
in  my  own  country,  make  a  stand  in  a  Directors'  Meeting  for 
ninety  million  people  over  there,  say  your  say  for  them,  vote 
your  stock  for  them,  say  how  you  want  a  Meat  Trust  you  belong 
to,  to  behave,  how  you  want  it  to  be  a  big,  serious,  business  insti- 
tution and  not  a  humdrum,  mechanical-minded  hold-up  any- 
body could  think  of  —  in  charge  of  a  few  uninteresting,  inglori- 
ous men  —  men  nobody  really  cares  to  know  and  that  nobody 
wants  to  be  like  .....  when  I  think  of  what  a  man  like  you 
with  money  can  do ! 

"  Am  I  not  tired  every  day,  are  you  not  tired,  yourself,  of 
going  about  everywhere  and  seeing  money  in  the  hands  of  all 
these  second-class,  socially  feeble-minded  men,  of  seeing  col- 
umns in  the  papers  of  what  such  men  think,  of  having  college 
presidents,  great  universities,  domes,  churches  and  thousands 
of  steeples  all  deferring  to  them  and  bowing  to  them,  and  all 
the  superior,  live,  interested  people  ringing  their  door  bells  for 
their  money  waiting  outside  on  benches  for  what  they  think? 

I  do  not  believe  that  Christ  came  into  the  world,  two  thousand 
years  ago,  to  say  that  only  the  men  who  have  minds  of  the 
second  class,  men  who  are  not  far-sighted  enough  in  business  to 
be  decently  unselfish  in  this  world,  should  be  allowed  to  have 
control  of  the  money  and  of  the  peoples'  means  of  living  in  it. 

We  are  living  in  an  age  of  big  machines  and  big,  inevitable 


428  CROWDS 

aggregations,  and  to  say  in  an  age  like  this,  and  above  all,  tc 
get  it  out  of  a  Bible,  or  put  it  into  a  hymn  book  or  make  a 
religion  of  it,  that  all  the  first  class  minds  of  the  world  —  the 
men  who  see  far  enough  to  be  unselfish,  should  give  over  their 
money  to  second-class  men,  is  the  most  monstrous,  most  un- 
believing, unfaithful,  unbiblical,  irreligious  thing  a  world  can  be 
guilty  of.  The  one  thing  that  is  now  the  matter  with  money, 
is  that  the  second-class  people  have  most  of  it. 

"  What  would  happen  if  we  applied  asceticism  or  a  tired,  dis- 
couraged unbelief  to  having  children  that  we  do  to  having 
pounds  and  pence  and  dollars  and  cents.?  You  would  not 
stand  for  that  would  you.'* " 

I  looked  at  his  five  sons. 

"  Suppose  all  the  good  families  of  to-day  were  to  take  the 
ground  that  having  children  is  a  self-indulgence  unworthy  of 
good  people;  suppose  the  good  people  leave  having  children 
in  this  world  almost  entirely  to  bad  ones? 

"  This  is  what  has  been  happening  to  money. 

"  Unbelief  in  money  is  unbelief  in  the  spirit.  It  is  paying  too 
much  attention  to  wealth  to  say  that  one  must  or  that  one  must 
not  have  it." 

I  cannot  recall  precisely  what  was  said  after  this  in  that  long 
evening  talk  of  ours  but  what  I  tried  to  say  perhaps  might  have 
been  something  like  this: 

The  essence  of  the  New  Testament  seems  to  be  the  emphasis 
of  a  man's  spirit  with  or  without  money.  Whether  a  man 
should  be  rich  or  get  out  of  being  rich  and  earn  the  right  to  be 
poor(which  some  very  true  and  big  men,  artists  and  inventors 
in  this  world  will  always  prefer)  turns  on  a  man's  temperament. 
If  a  man  has  a  money  genius  and  can  so  handle  money  that  he 
can  make  money,  and  if  he  can,  at  the  same  time,  and  all  in  one 
bargain,  express  his  own  spirit,  if  he  can  free  the  spirits  of  other 
men  with  money  and  express  his  religion  in  it,  he  should  be 
ostracized  by  all  thoughtful.  Christian  people,  if  in  the  des- 
perate crisis  of  an  age  like  this,  he  tries  to  get  out  of  being  rich. 


NEWS  AND  MONEY  429 

The  one  thing  a  man  can  be  said  to  be  for  in  this  world,  is  to 
express  the  goodness  —  the  religion  in  him,  in  something,  and 
if  he  is  not  the  kind  of  man  who  can  express  his  religion  in  money 
and  in  employing  labour,  then  let  him  find  something  —  say 
music  or  radium  or  painting  in  which  he  can.  It  is  this  bound- 
ing off  in  a  world,  this  making  a  bare  spot  in  life  and  saying 
"This  is  not  God,  this  cannot  be  God!"  —  it  is  this  alone 
that  is  sacriligious. 


It  may  be  that  I  am  merely  speaking  for  myself,  but  I  did 
discover  a  man  on  Fleet  Street  the  other  day  who  quite  agreed 
with  me  apparently,  that  if  the  thing  a  man  has  in  him  is  religion 
he  can  put  it  up  or  express  it  in  almost  anything. 

This  man  had  tried  to  express  his  idea  in  a  window. 

He  had  done  a  Leonardo  Da  Vinci's  "Last  Supper,"  in  sugar 
— a  kind  of  bas-relief  in  sugar, 

I  do  not  claim  that  this  kind  of  fooUsh,  helpless  caricature 
of  a  great  spiritual  truth  filled  me  with  a  great  reverence 
or  that  it  does  now. 

But  it  did  make  me  think  how  things  were. 

If  sugar  with  this  man,  like  money  with  a  banker,  was  the 
one  logical  thing  the  man  had  to  express  his  religion  in,  or  if 
what  he  had  had  to  express  had  been  really  true  and  fine,  or  if 
there  had  been  a  true  or  fine  or  great  man  to  express,  I  do  not 
doubt  sugar  could  have  been  made  to  do  it. 

One  single  man  with  enough  money  and  enough  religious 
skill  in  human  nature,  who  would  get  into  the  Sugar  Trust  with 
some  good,  fighting,  voting  stock,  who  could  make  the  Sugar 
Trust  do  as  it  would  be  done  by,  would  make  over  American 
industry  in  twenty  years. 

He  would  have  thrown  up  as  on  a  high  mountain,  before  all 
American  men,  one  great  specimen,  enviable  business.  He 
would  have  revealed  as  in  a  kind  of  deep,  sober  apocalypse, 
American  business  to  itself.     He  would  have  revealed  American 


430  CROWDS 

business  as  a  new  national  art  form,  as  an  expression  of  the 
practical  religion,  the  genius  for  real  things,  that  is  our  real 
modern  temperament  in  America  and  the  real  modern  tempera- 
ment in  aU  the  nations. 

Of  course  it  may  not  need  to  be  done  precisely  with  the 
Sugar  Trust. 

The  Meat  Trust  might  do  it  first,  or  the  Steel  Trust. 

But  it  will  be  done. 

Then  the  Golden  Rule,  one  great  Golden  Rule-machine 
having  been  installed  in  our  trust  that  knew  the  most,  and  was 
most  known,  it  could  be  installed  in  the  others. 

Religion  can  be  expressed  much  better  to-day  in  a  stock- 
holder's meeting  than  it  can  in  a  prayer-meeting. 

Charles  Cabot,  of  Boston,  walked  in  quietly  to  the  Stock- 
holder's Meeting  of  the  Steel  Trust  one  day  and  with  a 
little  touch  of  money  —  $2,900  in  one  hand,  and  a  copy  of 
the  American  Magazine  in  the  other,  made  (with  $2,900) 
$1,468,000,000  do  right. 


PART  THREE 

NEWS  AND  GOVERNMENT 

CHAPTER  I 

OXFORD  STREET  AND   THE  HOUSE   OF  COMMONS 

EVERY  now  and  then  when  I  am  in  London  (at  the  in- 
stigation of  some  business  man  who  takes  the  time  off  to  belong 
to  it),  I  drop  into  a  pleasant  but  other-worldly  and  absent- 
minded  place  called  the  House  of  Commons. 

I  sit  in  the  windows  in  the  smoking-room  and  watch  the  faces 
of  the  members  all  about  me  and  watch  the  steamships,  strangely, 
softly,  suddenly  —  Shakespeare  and  Pepys,  outside  on  the 
river,  slip  gravely  by  under  glass. 

Or  I  go  in  and  sit  down  under  the  gallery,  face  to  face  with 
the  Speaker,  looking  across  those  profiles  of  world-makers  in 
their  seats;  and  I  watch  and  listen  in  the  House  itself.  There 
is  a  kind  of  pleasant,  convenient,  appropriate  hush  upon  the 
world  there. 

Wisdom. 

The  decorous,  orderly  machinery  of  knowledge  rolls  over  one 
—  one  listens  to  It,  to  the  soft  clatter  of  the  endless  belt  of 
words. 

Every  now  and  then  one  sees  a  member  in  the  middle  of  a 
speech,  or  possibly  in  the  middle  of  a  sentence,  slip  up  quietly 
and  take  a  look  (under  glass)  at  The  People,  or  he  uses  a  micro- 
scope, perhaps,  or  a  reading  glass  on  The  People,  Mr.  Bonar 
Law's,  Mr.  Lloyd  George's,  Ramsay  MacDonald's,\Yill  Crook's, 
or  somebody's.     Then  he  comes   back   gravely  as   if  he  had 

481 


432  CROWDS 

got  the  people  attended  to  now,  and  finishes  what  he  was 
saying. 

It  is  a  very  queer  feeling  one  has  about  the  People  in  the 
House  of  Commons. 

I  mean  the  feeling  of  their  being  under  glass;  they  all  seem 
so  manageable,  so  quiet  and  so  remote,  a  kind  of  glazed-over 
picture  in  still  life,  of  themselves.  Every  now  and  then,  of 
course  one  takes  a  member  seriously  when  he  steps  up  to  the 
huge  showcase  of  specimen  crowds,  which  members  are  always 
referring  to  in  their  speeches.     But  nothing  comes  of  it. 

The  crowds  seem  very  remote  there  under  the  glass.  One 
feels  like  smashing  something  —  getting  down  to  closer  terms 
with  them  —  one  longs  for  a  Department  Store  or  a  bridge  or 
a  'bus  —  something  that  rattles  and  bangs  and  is. 

All  the  while  outside  the  mighty  street — that  huge  mega- 
phone of  the  crowd,  goes  shouting  past.  One  wishes  the  House 
would  notice  it.  But  no  one  does.  There  is  always  just  the 
House  Itself  and  that  hush  or  ring  of  silence  around  it,  all 
England  listening,  all  the  little  country  papers  far  away  with 
their  hands  up  to  their  ears  and  the  great  serious-minded 
Dailies,  and  the  witty  Weeklies,  the  stately  Monthlies,  and 
Quarterlies  all  acting  as  if  it  mattered.     .     .     . 

Even  during  the  coal  strike  nothing  really  happened  in  the 
House  of  Commons.  There  was  a  sense  of  the  great  serious 
people,  of  the  crowds  on  Westminster  Bridge  surging  softly 
through  glass  outside,  but  nothing  got  in.  Big  Ben  boomed 
down  the  river,  across  the  pavements,  over  the  hurrying  crowds 
and  over  all  the  men  and  the  women,  the  real  business  men  and 
women.  The  only  thing  about  the  House  that  seemed  to  have 
anything  to  do  with  anybody  was  Big  Ben. 

Finally  one  goes  up  to  Harrod's  to  get  relief,  or  one  takes  a 
'bus,  or  one  tries  Trafalgar  Square,  or  one  sees  if  one  can  really 
get  across  the  Strand  or  one  does  something — almost  anything 
to  recall  one's  self  to  real  life. 

And  then,  of  course,  there  is  Oxford  Street. 


OXFORD  STREET  AND  THE  HOUSE  433 

Almost  always  after  watching  the  English  people  express 
themselves  or  straining  to  express  themselves  in  the  House  of 
Commons,  I  try  Oxford  Street. 

I  know,  of  course,  that  as  an  art-form  for  expressing  a  great 
people,  Oxford  Street  is  not  all  that  it  should  be,  but  there  is 
certainly  something,  after  all  the  mooniness  and  the  dim 
droniness,  and  lawyer-mindedness  in  the  way  the  English 
people  express  themselves  or  think  that  they  ought  to  express 
themselves  in  their  House  of  Commons  —  there  is  certainly 
something  that  makes  Oxford  Street  seem  suddenly  a  fine,  free, 
candid  way  for  a  great  people  to  talk!  And  there  is  all  the 
gusto,  too,  the  'busses,  the  taxies,  the  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  men  and  women  saying  things  and  buying  things  they 
believe. 

Taking  in  the  shops  on  both  sides  of  the  street,  and  taking 
in  the  things  the  people  are  doing  behind  the  counters,  and 
in  the  aisles,  and  up  in  the  office  windows  —  three  blocks  of 
Oxford  Street  really  express  what  the  English  people  really 
want  and  what  they  really  think  and  what  they  believe  and  put 
up  money  on,  more  than  three  years  of  the  House  of  Commons. 

If  I  were  an  Englishman  I  would  rather  be  elected  to  walk  up 
and  down  Oxford  Street  and  read  what  I  saw  there  than  to  be 
elected  to  a  seat  in  the  House  of  Commons,  and  I  could  accom- 
plish more  and  learn  more  for  a  nation,  with  three  blocks  of 
Oxford  Street,  with  what  I  could  gather  up  and  read  there, 
and  with  what  I  could  resent  and  believe  there,  than  I  could 
with  three  years  of  the  House  of  Commons. 

I  know  that  anybody,  of  course,  could  be  elected  to  walk 
up  and  down  Oxford  Street.     But  it  is  enough  for  me. 

So  I  almost  always  try  it  after  the  House  of  Commons. 

And  when  I  have  taken  a  little  swing  down  Oxford  Street 
and  got  the  House  of  Commons  out  of  my  system  a  little, 
perhaps  I  go  down  to  the  Embankment,  and  drop  into  my 
club. 
•    Then  I  sit  in  the  window  and  mull. 


434  CROWDS 

If  the  English  people  express  themselves  and  express  what 
they  want  and  what  they  are  bound  to  have,  on  Oxford  Street 
and  put  their  money  down  for  it,  so  much  better  than  they 
do  in  the  House  of  Commons,  why  should  they  not  do  it  there? 

Why  should  elaborate,  roundabout,  mysterious  things  like 
governments,  that  have  to  be  spoken  of  in  whispers  (and  that 
express  themselves  usually  in  a  kind  of  lawyer-minded  way,  in 
picked  and  dried  words  like  wills),  be  looked  upon  so  seriously, 
and  be  taken  on  the  whole,  as  the  main  reliance  the  people 
have,  in  a  great  nation,  for  expressing  themselves? 

Why  should  not  a  great  people  be  allowed  to  say  what  they 
are  like  and  to  say  what  they  want  and  what  they  are  bound  to 
get,  in  the  way  Oxford  Street  says  things,  in  a  few  straight, 
clean-cut,  ordinary  words,  in  long  quiet  rows  of  deeds,  of  buying 
and  selling  and  acting? 

Pounds,  shillings,  and  silence. 

Then  on  to  the  next  thing. 

If  the  House  of  Commons  were  more  like  Oxford  Street  or 
even  if  it  had  suddenly  something  of  the  tone  of  Oxford  Street, 
if  suddenly  it  were  to  begin  some  fine  morning  to  express  Eng- 
land the  way  Oxford  Street  does,  would  not  one  see,  in  less  than 
three  months,  new  kinds  and  new  sizes  of  men  all  over  England, 
wanting  to  belong  to  it? 

Big,  powerful,  uncompromising,  creative  men  who  have  no 
time  for  twiddling,  who  never  would  have  dreamed  of  being 
tucked  away  in  the  House  of  Commons  before,  would  want  to 
belong  to  it. 

In  the  meantime,  of  course,  the  men  of  England  who  have 
empires  to  express,  are  not  unnaturally  expressing  them  in 
more  simple  language  like  foundries,  soap  factories  around 
a  world,  tungsten  mines,  department  stores,  banks,  subways, 
railroads  for  seventy  nations,  and  ships  on  seven  seas,  Winnipeg 
trolleys  and  little  New  York  skyscrapers. 

Business  men  of  the  more  usual  or  humdrum  kind  could  not 
do  it,  but  certainly,  the  first  day  that  business  men  like  thesci 


OXFORD  STREET  AND  THE  HOUSE  435 

of  the  first  or  world-size  class,  once  find  the  House  of  Commons 
a  place  they  like  to  be  in,  once  begin  expressing  the  genius  of  the 
English  people  in  government  as  they  are  already  expressing 
the  genius  of  the  English  people  in  owning  the  earth,  in  buying 
and  selling,  in  inventing  things  and  in  inventing  corporations, 
the  House  of  Commons  wi\[  cease  to  be  a  bog  of  words,  an  abyss 
of  committees,  and  legislation  will  begin  to  be  run  like  a  rail- 
road —  on  a  block  signal  system,  rows  of  things  taken  up, 
gone  over,  and  finished.  The  click  of  the  signal.  Then  the 
next  thing. 

I  sit  in  my  club  and  look  out  of  the  window  and  think.  Just 
outside  thousands  of  taxies  shooting  all  these  little  mighty  wills 
of  men  across  my  window,  across  London,  across  England, 
across  the  world  .  .  .  the  huge,  imperious  street  ...  all 
these  men  hurling  themselves  about  in  it,  joining  their  wills  on 
to  telephone  wires,  to  mighty  trains  and  little  quiet  country 
roads,  hitching  up  cables  to  their  wills,  and  ships  —  hitching 
up  the  very  clouds  over  the  sea  to  their  wills  and  running  a 
world  —  why  are  not  men  like  these  —  men  who  have  the 
street-spirit  in  them,  this  motor  genius  of  driving  through  to 
what  they  want,  taking  seats  in  the  House  of  Commons.^ 

Perhaps  Oxford  Street  is  more  efficient  and  more  character- 
istic in  expressing  the  genius  and  the  will  of  the  English  people 
than  the  House  of  Commons  is  because  of  the  way  in  which  the 
people  select  the  men  they  want  to  express  them  in  Oxford 
Street. 

It  may  be  that  the  men  the  people  have  selected  to  be  at 
the  top  of  the  nation's  law-making  are  not  selected  by  as 
skillful,  painstaking,  or  thorough  a  process  as  the  men  who  have 
been  selected  to  be  placed  at  the  top  of  the  nation's  buying 
and  selling. 

Possibly  the  reason  the  House  of  Commons  does  not  express 
the  will  of  the  people  is,  that  its  members  are  merely  selected 
in  a  loose,  vague  way  and  by  merely  counting  noses. 

Possibly,  too,  the  men  who  are  selected  by  a  true,  honest, 


436  CROWDS 

direct,  natural  selection  to  be  the  leaders  and  to  free  the  ener- 
gies and  steer  the  work  of  the  people,  the  men  who  are 
selected  to  lead  by  being  seen  and  lived  with  and  worked  with 
all  day,  every  day,  are  better  selected  men  than  men  who  hav- 
ing been  voted  on  on  slips  of  paper,  and  having  been  seen  in 
newspaper  paragraphs,  travel  up  to  London  and  begin  thought- 
lessly running  a  world. 

The  business  man  drops  into  the  House  of  Commons  after 
the  meeting  of  his  firm  in  Bond  Street,  Lombard  Street,  or 
Oxford  Street  and  takes  a  look  at  it.  He  sees  before  him  a  huge 
tool  or  piece  of  machinery  —  a  body  of  men  intended  to  work 
together  and  to  get  certain  grave,  particular,  and  important 
things  done,  that  the  people  want  done,  and  he  does  not  see 
how  a  great  good-hearted  chaos  or  welter,  a  kind  of  chance 
national  Weather  of  Human  Nature  like  the  House  of  Com- 
mons, can  get  the  things  done. 

So  he  confines  himself  more  and  more  to  business  where 
he  loses  less  time  in  wondering  what  other  people  think  or  if 
they  think  at  all,  cuts  out  the  work  he  sees,  and  does  it. 

He  thinks  how  it  would  be  if  things  were  turned  around  and 
if  people  tried  to  get  expressed  in  business  in  the  loose  way, 
the  thoughtless  reverie  of  voting  that  they  use  in  trying  to  get 
themselves  expressed  in  politics. 

He  thinks  the  stockholders  of  the  Sunlight  Soap  Company, 
Limited,  would  be  considerably  alarmed  to  have  the  president 
and  superintendent  and  treasurer  and  the  buyers  and  salesmen 
of  the  company  elected  at  the  polls  by  the  people  in  the  county 
or  by  popular  suffrage.  He  thinks  that  thousands  of  the  hands 
as  well  as  the  stockholders  would  be  alarmed  too.  It  does  not 
seem  to  him  that  anybody,  poor  or  rich,  employer  or  employee, 
in  matters  of  grave  personal  concern,  would  be  willing  to  trust 
his  interest  or  would  really  expect  the  people,  all  the  people  as 
a  whole,  to  be  represented  or  to  get  what  they  wanted,  to  act 
definitely  and  efficiently  through  the  vague  generalizations  of 
the  polls.     Perhaps  a  natural  selection,  a  dead-earnest  rigorous, 


OXFORD  STREET  AND  THE  HOUSE  437 

selection  that  men  work  on  nine  hours  a  day,  an  implacable, 
unremitting  process  during  working  hours,  of  sorting  men  out 
(which  we  call  business),  is  the  crowd's  most  reliable  way  of 
registering  what  it  definitely  thinks  about  the  men  it  wants 
to  represent  it.  Business  is  the  crowd's,  big,  serious,  daily 
voting  in  pounds,  shillings,  and  pence  —  its  hour  to  hour, 
unceasing,  intimate,  detailed  labour  in  picking  men  out,  in 
putting  at  the  top  the  men  it  can  work  with  best,  the  men  who 
most  express  it,  who  have  the  most  genius  to  serve  crowds,  to 
reveal  to  crowds  their  own  minds,  and  supply  to  them  what 
they  want. 

As  full  as  it  is  —  like  all  broad,  honest  expressions,  of 
human  shortcomings  and  of  things  that  are  soon  to  be  stopped, 
it  does  remain  to  be  said  that  business,  in  a  huge,  rough  way, 
daily  expressing  the  crowds  as  far  as  they  have  got  —  the  best 
in  them  and  the  worst  in  them,  is,  after  all,  their  most  faithful 
and  true  record,  their  handwriting.  Business  is  the  crowds' 
autograph  —  its  huge,  slow,  clumsy  signature  upon  our  world. 

Buying  and  selling  is  the  life  blood  of  the  crowds'  thought, 
its  big,  brutal  daily  confiding  to  us  of  its  view  of  human  life. 
What  do  the  crowds,  poor  and  rich,  really  believe  about  life.'* 
Property  is  the  last  will  and  testament  of  Crowds. 

The  man-sorting  that  goes  on  in  distributing  and  producing 
property  is  the  Crowd's  most  unremitting,  most  normal,  tem- 
peramental way  of  determining  and  selecting  its  most  efficient 
and  valuable  leaders  —  its  men  who  can  express  it,  and  who 
can  act  for  it. 

This  is  the  first  reason  I  would  give  against  letting  the 
people  rely  on  having  a  House  of  Commons  compel  business 
men  to  be  good. 

Men  who  meet  now  and  again  during  the  year,  afternoons  or 
ev^enings,  who  have  been  picked  out  to  be  at  the  top  of  the 
nation's  talking,  by  a  loose  absent-minded  and  illogical 
paper-process,  cannot  expect  to  control  men  who  have  been 
picked   out    to   be    at   the    top   of   a    nation's    buying    and 


438  CROWDS 

selling,  by  a  hard-working,  closely  fitting,  logical  process  — 
the  men  that  all  the  people  by  everything  they  do,  every 
day,   all  day,   have  picked  out   to   represent  them. 

Any  chance  three  blocks  of  Oxford  Street  could  be  relied  on 
to  do  better. 

Keeping  the  polls  open  once  in  so  often,  a  few  hours,  and 
using  hearsay  and  little  slips  of  paper  —  anybody  dropping  in 
—  seems  a  rather  fluttery  and  uncertain  way  to  pick  out  the 
representatives  of  the  people,  after  one  has  considered  three 
blocks  of  Oxford  Street. 

The  next  thing  the  crowd  is  going  to  do  in  getting  what  it 
wants  from  business  men  is  to  deal  directly  with  the  business 
men  themselves  and  stop  feeling,  what  many  people  feel 
partly  from  habit,  perhaps,  that  the  only  way  the  crowd  can 
get  to  what  it  wants  is  to  go  way  over  or  way  back  or  way 
around  by  Robin  Hood's  barn  or  the  House  of  Commons. 

But  there  is  a  second  reason: 

The  trouble  is  not  merely  in  the  way  men  who  sit  in  the 
House  of  Commons  are  selected.  The  real  deep-seated  trouble 
with  the  men  who  sit  in  the  House  of  Commons  is  that  they 
like  it.  The  difficulty  (as  in  the  American  Congress  too)  seems 
to  be  something  in  the  men  themselves.  It  lies  in  what  might 
be  called,  for  lack  of  a  better  name,  perhaps,  the  Hem  and 
Haw  or  Parliament  Temperament. 

The  dominating  type  of  man  in  all  the  world's  legislative 
bodies,  for  the  time  being,  seems  to  be  the  considerer  or  recon- 
siderer,  the  man  who  dotes  on  the  little  and  tiddly  sides  of 
great  problems.  The  greatness  of  the  problem  furnishes,  of 
course,  the  pleasant,  pale  glow,  the  happy  sense  of  importance 
to  a  man,  and  then  there  is  all  the  jolly  littleness  of  the  little 
things  besides  —  the  little  things  that  a  little  man  can  make 
look  big  by  getting  them  in  the  way  of  big  ones  —  a  great 
nation  looking  on  and  waiting.  .  .  .  For  such  a  man  there 
always  seems  to  be  a  certain  coziness  and  hominess  in  a 
Legislative  Body.     .     .     . 


OXFORD  STREET  AND  THE  HOUSE  439 

I 

As  a  seat  in  the  House  of  Commons  not  unnaturally  —  every 
year  it  is  hemmed  or  hawed  in,  gets  farther  and  farther  away 
from  the  people,  it  is  becoming  more  and  more  apparent  to 
the  people  every  year  that  the  Members  of  their  House  of 
Commons  as  a  class  are  unlikely  to  do  anything  of  a  very 
striking  or  important  or  lasting  value  in  the  way  of  getting 
business  men  to  be  good. 

The  more  efficient  and  practical  business  men  are  coming  to 
suspect  that  the  members  of  the  House  of  Commons,  speaking 
broadly,  do  not  know  the  will  of  the  people,  and  that  they  could 
not  express  it  in  creative,  straj^tforward  and  affirmative  laws 
if  they  did. 


CHAPTER  II 
OXFORD  STREET  HUMS.      THE  HOUSE  HEMS 

BUT  it  is  not  only  because  the  members  of  the  House  of 
Commons  are  selected  in  a  vague  way  or  because  they  are 
a  vague  kind  of  men,  that  they  fail  to  represent  the  people. 

The  third  reason  against  having  a  House  of  Commons  try 
to  compel  business  men  to  be  good,  by  law,  is  its  out-of-the-way 
position. 

The  out-of-the-way  position  that  a  Parliament  occupies  in 
getting  business  men  to  be  good,  can  be  best  considered, 
perhaps,  by  admitting  at  the  outset  that  a  government 
really  is  one  very  real  and  genuine  way  a  great  people 
may  have  of  expressing  themselves,  of  expressing  what  they 
are  like  and  what  they  want,  and  that  business  is  another 
way. 

Then  the  question  narrows  down.  Which  way  of  expressing 
the  people  is  the  one  that  expresses  them  the  most  to  the  point, 
and  which  expresses  them  where  their  being  expressed  counts 
the  most? 

The  people  have  a  Government.  And  the  people  have  Busi- 
ness. 

What  is  a  Government  for? 

What  is  Business  for? 

Business  is  the  occupation  of  finding  out  and  anticipating 
what  the  wants  of  the  English  people  really  are  and  of  finding 
out  ways  of  supplying  them. 

The  business  men  on  Oxford  Street  hire  twenty  or  thirty 
thousand  men  and  women,  keep  them  at  work  eight  or  nine 
hours  a  day,  five  or  six  days  in  a  week,  finding  out  what  the 

440 


OXFORD  STREET  HUMS     THE  HOUSE  HEMS    441 

things  are  that  the  English  people  want  and  reporting  on  them 
and  supplying  them. 

They  are  naturally  in  a  strategic  position  to  find  out,  not 
only  what  kinds  of  things  the  people  want,  but  to  find  out,  too, 
just  how  they  want  the  things  placed  before  them,  what  kind 
of  storekeepers  and  manufacturers,  salesmen  and  saleswomen 
they  tolerate,  like  to  deal  with  and  prefer  to  have  prosper. 

And  the  business  men  are  not  only  in  the  most  strategic 
and  competent  position  to  find  out  what  the  people  who  buy 
want,  but  to  find  out  too,  what  the  people  who  sell  want.  They 
are  in  the  best  position  to  know,  and  to  know  intimately,  what 
the  salesmen  and  saleswomen  want  and  what  they  want  to  be 
and  what  they  want  to  do  or  not  do. 

They  are  in  a  close  and  watchful  position,  too,  with  regard 
to  the  conditions  in  the  factories  from  which  their  goods  come 
and  with  regard  to  what  the  employers,  stockholders,  foremen 
and  workmen  in  those  factories  want. 

What  is  more  to  the  point,  these  same  business  men,  when 
they  have  once  found  out  just  what  it  is  the  people  want,  are 
the  only  men  who  are  in  a  position,  all  in  the  same  breath, 
without  asking  anybody  and  without  arguing  with  anybody, 
without  meddling  or  convincing  anybody  —  to  get  it  for 
them. 

Finding  out  what  people  want  and  getting  it  for  them  is 
what  may  be  called,  controlling  business. 

The  question  not  unnaturally  arises  with  all  these  business 
men  and  their  twenty  or  thirty  thousand  people  working  with 
them,  eight  or  nine  hours  a  day,  five  or  six  days  a  week,  in 
controlling  business,  why  should  the  members  of  the  House 
of  Commons  expect,  by  taking  a  few  afternoons  or  evemngs 
off  for  it,  to  control  business  for  them? 

If  I  were  an  employee  and  if  what  I  wanted  to  do  was  to 
improve  the  conditions  of  labour  in  my  own  calling,  I  do  not 
think  I  would  want  to  take  the  time  to  wait  several  months, 
probably,  to  convince  my  member  of  Parliament,  and  then 


442  CROWDS 

wait  a  few  months  more  for  him  to  convince  the  other  members 
of  Parliament,  and  then  vote  his  one  vote.  I  would  rather 
deal  directly  with  my  employer. 

If  my  employer  is  on  my  back  and  if  I  can  once  get  the 
attention  of  my  employer  himself,  as  to  where  he  is  and  as  to 
how  he  is  interrupting  what  I  am  doing  for  him  —  if  I  once 
get  his  attention  and  once  get  him  to  notice  my  back,  he  can 
get  down.  No  one  else  can  get  down  for  him  and  no  one  else, 
except  by  turning  a  whole  nation  all  around,  can  make  him 
get  down.  Why  should  a  man  bother  with  T.  P.'s  Weekly  or 
with  Horatio  Bottomley  or  with  the  Daily  Mail  or  the  Times, 
with  a  score  of  other  people's  by-elections  all  over  England  to 
lift  his  own  employer  off  his  back? 

There  is  a  very  simple  rule  for  it. 

The  way  to  lift  one's  employer  off  one's  back  is  to  make 
one's  back  so  eflBcient  that  he  cannot  afford  to  be  on  it. 

The  first  thing  I  would  do  would  be  to  see  if  I  could  not 
persuade  my  employer  to  take  steps  to  train  me  and  to  make 
me  efficient,  himself.  And  perhaps  the  second  thing  I  would 
try  to  do  would  be  to  wake  my  trades  union  up,  to  get  my  trades 
union  to  consent  to  let  me  want  to  try  to  be  efficient  and  work 
as  hard  as  I  can,  or  to  consent  to  my  employer's  hiring  engineers 
to  make  me  efficient.  I  would  try  to  get  my  trades  union  to 
be  interested  in  hiring  itself  some  special  expert  like  Frederick 
Taylor,  some  specialist  in  making  a  man  do  three  times  as  much 
work  with  the  same  strength,  making  him  three  times  as  valu- 
able for  his  employer  and  three  times  as  fit  and  strong  for 
himself. 

This  is  what  I  would  do  if  I  wanted  to  make  my  employer 
good.  I  would  be  so  good  that  he  could  not  afford  not  being 
good  too. 

If  I  were  an  employer,  on  the  other  hand,  and  understood 
human  nature,  and  knew  enough  about  psychology  to  found 
a  great  business  house  and  wanted  to  make  my  employee  good, 
or  make  him  work  three  times  as  hard  for  me,  with  three  times 


OXFORD  STREET  HUMS.    THE  HOUSE  HEMS     443 

the  normal  strength,  day  by  day,  and  have  a  normal  old  age 
to  look  forward  to,  I  do  not  think  I  would  wait  for  the  House 
of  Commons  to  butt  in  and  pension  him.  It  seems  to  me  that 
I  would  be  in  a  position  to  do  it  more  adequately,  more  rapidly, 
and  do  it  with  more  intimate  knowledge  of  economy  than  the 
House  of  Commons  could.  And  I  would  not  have  to  convince 
several  hundred  men,  men  from  rural  counties,  how  I  could 
improve  my  factory  and  get  them  to  let  me  improve  it.  I 
could  do  it  quietly  by  myself. 

In  any  given  industrial  difficulty,  there  is  and  must  be  a 
vision  for  every  man,  a  vision  either  borrowed  for  him  or  made 
for  him  by  some  one  else,  or  a  vision  he  has  made  for  himself, 
that  fits  in  just  where  he  is.  In  the  last  analysis  our  industrial 
success  is  going  to  lie  in  the  sense  of  Here,  and  Me,  and  Now, 
raised  to  the  n*^*"  power,  in  what  might  be  called  a  kind  of  larger 
syndicalism. 

The  typical  syndicalist,  instead  of  saying,  as  he  does  to-day, 
*'We  will  take  the  factories  out  of  our  employers  hands  and 
run  them  ourselves,"  is  going  to  say,  "We  will  make  ourselves 
fit  to  run  the  factories  ourselves." 

What  would  please  the  employers  more,  give  them  a 
general,  or  national  confidence  in  trying  to  run  business  and 
improve  the  conditions  of  work  to-day,  than  to  have  their 
employees,  suddenly,  all  over  the  nation,  begin  doing  their 
work  so  well  that  they  would  be  fit  to  run  the  factories.'* 

What  is  true  of  employers  and  employees  in  factories  is  still 
more  true  of  the  employers  and  employees  in  the  great  retail 
stores.  If  there  is  one  thing  rather  than  another  the  business 
men  and  women  on  Oxford  Street,  the  managers,  floor  walkers 
and  clerks  all  up  and  down  the  street  are  really  engaged  in  all 
day  all  their  lives,  it  is  what  might  be  called  a  daily  nine-hour 
drill  in  understanding  people.  Why  should  employers  and 
employees  like  these  —  experts  in  human  nature  —  men  who 
make  their  profession  a  success  by  studying  human  nature, 
and  by  working  in  it  daily,  call  in  a  few  drifting  gentlemen  from 


444  CROWDS 

the  House  of  Commons  and  expect  them  to  work  out  their 
human  problems  better  than  they  can  do  it? 

Employers  and  clerks  in  retail  stores  are  the  two  sets  of 
people  in  all  the  world  most  competent  to  study  together  the 
working  details  of  human  nature,  to  act  for  themselves  in 
self-respecting    man-fashion  and  without  whining  at  a  nation. 

Who  that  they  could  hope  to  deal  with  and  get  what  they 
want  from,  could  know  more  about  human  nature  than  they  do? 
Are  they  not  the  men  of  all  others,  all  up  and  down  that  little 
strip  of  Oxford  Street,  who  devote  their  entire  time  to  human 
nature?  They  are  in  the  daily  profession  of  knowing  the 
soonest  and  knowing  the  most  about  what  people  are  like,  and 
about  what  people  will  probably  think.  They  are  intimate 
with  their  peccadillos  in  what  they  want  to  wear  and  in  what 
they  want  to  eat;  they  have  learned  their  likes  and  dislikes  in 
human  nature;  they  know  what  they  will  support  and  what 
they  will  defy  in  human  nature,  in  clerks,  and  in  stores,  and  in 
storekeepers. 

And  these  things  that  they  have  learned  about  human  nature 
(in  themselves  and  other  people)  they  have  learned  not  by 
talking  about  human  nature  but  by  a  grim  daily  doing  things 
with  it. 

These  things  being  so,  it  would  almost  seem  that  these  people 
and  people  like  them  were  qualified  to  act,  and  as  they  happen 
to  be  in  the  one  strategic  position,  both  employers  and  employees 
alike,  to  act  and  to  act  for  themselves  and  act  directly  and  act 
together,  it  will  not  be  very  long,  probably,  before  the  nation 
will  be  very  glad  to  have  them  do  it. 

It  is  likely  to  be  seen  very  soon  (at  least  by  all  skilled  Labour 
and  all  skilled  Capital)  that  running  out  into  the  street  and 
crying  "Help!"  and  calling  in  some  third  person  to  settle 
family  difiiculties  that  can  be  better  settled  by  being  faced  and 
thought  out  in  private,  is  an  inefficient  and  incompetent  thing 
to  do. 

^nd  for  the  most   part   it  is  going  to  be  only  in  the  more 


OXFORD  STREET  HUMS.    THE  HOUSE  HEMS     445 

superficial,  inefficient,  thoughtless  industry  that  men,  either 
employers  or  employed,  will  be  inclined  to  leave  their  daily 
work,  run  out  wildly  and  drag  in  a  House  of  Commons  to  help 
them  to  do  right, 

I  am  only  speaking  for  myself  but  certainly  if  I  were  an 
employer  or  an  employee,  I  would  not  want  to  wait  for  an 
election  a  year  away  or  to  wait  for  the  great  engineering  prob- 
lem of  compelling  my  member  of  Parliament  by  my  one  vote 
to  act  for  me. 

Perhaps  workingmen  in  England  and  America  are  deceived 
about  the  value  of  voting  as  a  means  of  improving  conditions 
of  workingmen.  Possibly  women  are  deceived  about  the  value 
of  voting  as  a  means  of  improving  the  conditions  of  working 
women. 

Possibly  a  woman  could  do  more  behind  a  counter  or  by 
buying  a  store  than  by  voting  to  have  some  man  she  has  read 
about  in  a  paper,  improve  business  by  talking  about  it  in 
the  House  of  Commons. 


There  is  also  a  kind  of  program  or  vision  of  action  one  can  use 
as  a  customer  as  well  as  an  employer  or  employee. 

I  might  speak  for  myself. 

I  have  about  so  much  money  I  spend  every  year  in  buy- 
ing things.  I  have  proposed  to  study  with  my  money  every 
firm  on  which  I  spend  it.  I  propose  to  take  away  my  trade 
from  the  firm  that  does  the  least  as  it  should  and  give  it  to 
the  firm  that  does  the  most  as  it  should.  I  will  vote  with  my 
entire  income  and  with  every  penny  I  save  for  the  kind  of 
employers  I  believe  in  and  that  I  want,  for  the  kind  of 
employers  who  can  earn  and  deserve  and  enjoy  and  keep 
the  kind  of  salesmen  and  saleswomen  I  choose  to  do  business 
with. 

All  the  year  round,  every  firm  with  which  I  deal,  I  am  going 
to  study  not  only  with  my  mind  but  with  my  money.       I  will 


446  CROWDS 

proceed  to  take  my  trade  away  from  the  big  employers  who 
think  that  I  want  shoddy  goods  or  who  think  that  I  want  or 
am  willing  to  trade  with  saleswomen  who  would  let  an  employer 
impose  on  them,  saleswomen  that  he  thinks  he  can  afford  to 
impose  upon.  I  will  proceed  to  vote  with  my  money,  with 
every  penny  I  have  in  the  world,  and  I  will  earn  more  that 
I  may  vote  more,  for  the  kind  of  employer  with  whom  I  like 
to  trade.  And  there  shall  not  be  a  man,  woman,  or  child 
of  my  acquaintance,  if  I  can  help  it,  or  of  my  family's 
acquaintance  who  shall  not  know  who  these  employers  are  by 
name  and  by  address,  the  employers  that  I  will  trade  with 
and  the  employers  that  I  will  not. 

This  is  my  idea  as  a  customer,  as  a  member  of  the  public, 
of  the  way  for  a  people  to  express  itself  and  to  get  what  it 
wants. 

What  I  want  may  be  said  to  be  a  kind  of  news,  news  about 
me  so  far  as  I  go,  as  one  member  of  the  public.  As  I  am  only 
one  person  every  item  of  the  news  about  me  must  bs  put 
where  it  works.  I  will  deal  directly  with  the  news  of  what 
I  want  and  I  will  convey  that  news,  not  to  the  House  of 
Commons  but  to  the  men  who  have  what  I  want  and  who  can 
give  it  to  me  when  they  know  it. 

News  is  the  real  government  now  and  always  of  this  world. 

When  one  has  made  up  one's  mind  to  tell  this  news,  ob- 
viously the  best  art-form  for  teUing  news  to  employers  and 
business  men  —  the  news  of  what  we  want  and  what  we  do 
not  want  and  of  what  we  want  in  them  as  well  as  in  the  things 
they  sell,  is  to  tell  them  the  news  in  the  language  they  have 
studied  most,  tell  it  to  them  in  pounds,  shillings,  dollars,  and 
cents,  and  by  trading  somewhere  else. 

The  gospel-bearing  value,  the  news  that  one  can  get  into  a 
man's  mind  with  one  dollar,  the  news  that  he  can  be  made  to 
see  and  act  on  for  one  dollar — well,  thinking  of  this  some  days, 
makes  for  me,  at  least,  going  up  and  down  the  Main  Street 
of  the  World  feeling  my  purse  snuggling  in  my  pocket,  and  all 


OXFORD  STREET  HUMS.    THE  HOUSE  HEMS     447 

the  people  I  can  step  up  to  with  my  purse  and  tell  so  many 
dollars'  worth  of  news  to.  tell  that  dollar's  worth  of  gospel  to 
about  the  world  —  makes  going  up  and  down  with  a  dollar 
on  a  big  business  street,  and  spending  it  or  not  spending  it, 
feel  like  a  kind  of  chronic,  easy,  happy,  going  to  Church, 

One  always  has  a  little  money  in  one's  pocket  that  one  spends 
or  that  one  won't  spend,  and  sometimes  even  not  spending  a 
dollar,  practised  by  some  people,  at  just  the  right  moment  and 
in  just  the  right  way,  can  be  made  to  mean  as  much  and  do 
as  much  with  a  world  as,  spending  a  thousand  dollars  would 
without  any  meaning  put  into  it. 

Sometimes  I  even  go  into  a  store  on  purpose,  a  certain  kind 
of  store  I  know  will  try  to  cheat  me  in  a  certain  way,  let  them 
look  a  minute  at  the  dollar  they  cannot  have.  Then  I  walk 
out  with  it  quietly. 

I  have  said  that  the  life-blood  of  my  convictions  shall  cir- 
culate in  my  money  and  if  I  cannot  express  my  soul,  my  religion, 
my  gospel  or  news  for  this  world,  news  about  what  I  want  and 
about  what  I  will  have  in  a  world,  if  I  cannot  make  every  dollar, 
every  shilling  I  earn,  go  through  the  world  and  sing  my  own 
little  world-song  in  it,  may  I  never  have  another  shilling  or 
earn  another  dollar  as  long  as  I  live! 

The  very  sight  of  a  dollar  now  whenever  I  see  one  once 
more,  fills  me  with  deep,  hopeful  working  joy,  thinking  of  what 
a  bargain  it  is  and  how  I  can  use  it  twice  over,  thinking  of  the 
dollar's  worth  of  news,  to  say  nothing  of  the  dollar's  worth  of 
tilings  that  belong  with  a  dollar! 


For  some  generations,  now,  we  have  tried  to  make  people 
good  in  a  vague,  general  way,  by  using  priests,  sacraments  and 
confessional  boxes.  For  some  centuries  we  have  been  trying 
to  make  people  good  with  lawyers  and  juries  and  ballot  boxes. 
We  are  now  to  try,  at  last,  religion  or  gospel  or  news  or  ideals  — 
practical,  shrewd  aimed  ideals,  that  is,  news  to  a  man  about 


448  CROWDS 

himself  or  news  about  the  man  from  the  man  himself  to  us. 
In  everything  a  man  does  he  is  expressing  to  us  this  news  about 
himself,  and  about  his  world,  and  about  his  God.  We  are 
all  telling  news  about  the  world  and  about  ourselves  all  the 
time  and  we  are  all  in  a  position  for  news  all  the  time. 

What  is  it  from  hour  to  hour  and  day  to  day  that  we  will  do 
and  we  will  not  do? 

This  news  about  us  is  the  religion  in  us. 

The  average  man  is  coming  to  have  very  accurate  ideas  of 
late  as  to  just  where  his  religion  is  located.  He  has  come  to 
see  that  real  religion  in  a  man,  very  conveniently  located 
(immediately  at  hand  in  him  and  personally  directed), is  his  own 
action,  his  own  divine  "I  will"  or  "I  won't." 

He  has  come  to  be  deeply  attracted  by  this  idea  of  a  religion 
for  every  man  just  where  he  is,  fitted  on  patiently,  cheerfully, 
to  just  where  he  is,  every  day  all  day,  his  glorious,  still,  practical, 
good-natured,  godlike  "  I  will  "  and  "  I  won't  " —  or  News 
about  himself. 


CHAPTER   III 
PRESIDENT  WILSON  AND  MOSES 

WE  ARE  deeply  interested  in  the  United  States  just  now,  in 
seeing  what  will  be  the  fate  of  President  Wilson's  government 
in  getting  men  to  be  good.  The  fate  of  a  government  in  1913 
may  be  said  to  stand  on  the  government's  psychology  or  knowl- 
edge of  human  nature  or  of  what  might  be  called  human  engin- 
eering, its  mastery  of  the  principles  of  lifting  over  in  great 
masses  heavy  spiritual  bodies,  like  people,  swinging  great 
masses  of  people's  minds  over  as  on  some  huge  national  derrick 
up  on  The  White  House,  from  one  lookout  on  life  to  another. 

There  are  certain  aspects  of  human  nature  when  power  is 
being  applied  to  it  in  this  way,  and  when  it  is  being  got  to  be 
good,  that  may  not  be  beside  the  point. 

If  one  could  drop  in  on  a  government  and  have  a  little 
neighbourly  chat  with  it,  as  one  was  going  by,  I  think  I  would 
rather  talk  with  it  (especially  our  government,  just  now), 
about  Human  Nature  than  about  anything. 

I  would   have  to  do  it,  of  course,  in  what  might  seem  to  a 
government  to  be  a  plain  and  homely  way. 

I  would  ask  the  government  what  it  thought  of  two  or  three 
observations  I  have  come  to  lately  about  the  way  that  human 
nature  works,  when  people  are  getting  it  to  be  good.  What 
a  government  thinks  about  them  might  possibly  prove  before 
many  months  to  be  quite  important  to  It. 

The  first  observation  is  this . 

The  reason  that  the  average  bachelor  is  a  bachelor  is  that  he 
spends  the  first  forty-five  years  of  his  life  in  picking  out  women 
he  will  not  many. 

M9 


450  CROWDS 

Possibly  it  is  because  many  people  are  following  the  same 
principle  in  trying  to  be  good  and  in  getting  other  people  to  be 
good  that  they  make  such  poor  work  of  it. 

Possibly  the  main  reason  why  there  are  so  many  wicked 
people  or  seem  to  be,  in  proportion,  among  the  Hebrews  in  the 
Old  Testament,  is  that  Moses  was  a  lawyer  and  that  he  tried 
to  start  off  a  great  people  with  the  Ten  Commandments,  that 
is,  a  list  of  nine  things  they  must  never  do  any  more,  and  of 
one  that  they  must. 

Some  of  us  who  have  tried  being  good,  have  noticed  that  when 
we  have  hit  it  off,  being  good  (at  least  with  us)  consists  in  being 
focused,  in  getting  concentrated,  in  getting  one's  attention  to 
what  one  really  wants  to  do. 

Moses'  idea  when  he  started  his  government,  the  idea  of 
getting  people  concentrated  on  not  getting  concentrated  on 
nine  things,  was  not  conducive  to  goodness.  The  fundamental 
principle  Moses  tried  to  make  the  people  good  with  was  a  con- 
tradiction in  terms.  It  is  a  principle  that  would  make  wicked 
people  out  of  almost  anybody.  It  is  not  a  practicable  principle 
for  a  government  to  rely  on  in  getting  people  to  be  good.  It 
did  not  work  with  the  people  in  the  Old  Testament  and  it  has 
never  worked  with  people  since. 

It  does  not  call  people  out,  in  getting  them  to  take  up  good- 
ness, to  point  out  to  them  nine  places  not  to  take  hold  of  and 
one  where  they  will  be  allowed  to  take  hold,  if  they  know  how. 

All  that  one  has  to  do  to  see  how  true  this  is,  is  to  observe  the 
groups  or  classes  of  people  who  are  especially  not  what  they 
should  be.  The  people  who  never  get  on  morally  (as  different 
as  they  may  be  in  most  things  and  in  the  fields  of  their  activity) 
all  have  one  illusion  in  common.  There  is  one  thing  they 
always  keep  saying  when  any  new  hopeful  person  tries  once 
more  to  get  them  to  be  good. 

They  say  (almost  as  if  they  had  a  phonograph)  that  they 
try  to  be  good  and  cannot  do  it. 


PRESroENT  WILSON  AND  MOSES  451 

And  this  is  not  true. 

When  a  man  says  he  tries  to  be  good  and  cannot  do  it,  if  he 
sits  down  and  thinks  it  over  he  finds,  generally,  he  is  not  trying 
to  be  good  at  all.     He  is  trying  to  be  not  bad. 

A  man  cannot  get  himself  reformed,  by  a  negative  process, 
by  being  not  bad,  and  it  is  still  harder  for  him  and  for  every- 
body, when  other  people  try  to  do  it  —  those  who  are  near 
him,  and  it  is  still,  still  harder  for  a  President  down  in  Wash- 
ington to  do  it. 

An  intelligent,  live  man  or  business  corporation  cannot  be 
got  to  keep  up  an  interest  very  long  in  being  not  bad.  Being 
not  bad  is  a  glittering  generality.  It  is  like  being  not  extrava- 
gant or  economical. 

Most  people  who  have  ever  tried  to  attain  in  a  respectable 
degree  to  a  pale  little  neuter  virtue  like  economy,  and  who  have 
reflected  upon  their  experiences,  have  come  to  conclusions  that 
may  not  be  very  far  from  the  point  in  a  fine  art  like  getting  one's 
self  to  be  good  or  getting  other  people  to  be  good. 

To  concentrate  on  being  economical  by  going  grimly  down  the 
street,  looking  at  the  shop  windows,  looking  hard  at  miles  of 
things  one  will  not  buy,  cannot  be  said  to  be  a  practicable 
method  of  attaining  economy. 

The  real  artist,  in  getting  himself  to  be  good,  proceeds  to 
upon  the  opposite  principle.  Even  if  the  good  thing  he  tries 
for  is  merely  a  negative  good  thing  like  economy,  he  instinctively 
seeks  out  some  positive  way  of  getting  it. 

A  man  who  is  cultivating  the  art  of  getting  himself  to  be 
economical,  or  of  getting  his  wife  to  be  economical,  does  not 
make  a  start  by  sitting  down  with  a  pencil  and  making  out  a  list, 
by  concentrating  his  mind  on  rows  of  things  that  he  and  his 
family  must  get  along  without.  He  knows  a  better  way.  He 
goes  downtown  with  his  entire  family,  takes  them  into  a  big 
shop  and  sits  down  with  them  and  listens  to  a  Steinway  Grand 
he  cannot  get.  As  he  listens  to  it  long  enough,  he  thinks  he| 
will  get  it. 


452  CROWDS 

Then  a  subtle,  spiritual  change  passes  over  him  and  over  his 
family  while  they  listen.  He  would  not  have  said  before  he 
started  that  sitting  down  and  thinking  of  things  he  could  get 
along  without  —  making  lists  in  his  mind  of  things  that  he 
must  not  have  —  could  ever  be  in  this  world  a  happy,  even  an 
almost  thrilling  experience.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  as  he  sits 
by  the  piano  and  listens,  he  finds  himself  counting  off  economies 
like  strings  of  pearls,  and  he  greets  each  new  self-sacrifice  he  can 
think  of  with  a  cheer.  While  the  Steinway  Grand  fills  the  room 
with  melody  all  around  him,  there  he  actually  is  sitting,  and 
having  the  time  of  his  life  dreaming  of  the  things  he  can  get 
along  without! 

When  he  goes  home,  he  goes  home  thinking.  And  the  family 
all  go  home  thinking. 

Then  economy  sets  in.  The  reason  most  people  make  a  fail- 
ure of  their  economy  is  that  they  are  not  artistic  with  it,  they 
do  not  enjoy  it.  They  do  not  pick  out  anything  to  enjoy  their 
economy  with. 

With  some  people  an  automobile  would  work  better  than  a 
Steinway  Grand  and  there  are  as  many  ways,  of  course,  of 
practising  the  Steinway  Grand  principle  in  not  being  bad  as 
there  are  people,  but  they  all  consist  apparently  in  selecting 
some  big,  positive  thing  that  one  wants  to  do,  which  logically 
includes  and  bundles  all  together  where  they  are  attended  to  in 
a  lump,  all  the  things  that  one  ought  not  to  do. 

Most  sins  (every  one  who  has  ever  tried  them  knows  this) 
most  sins  are  not  really  worth  bothering  with,  each  in  detail, 
even  the  not-doing  them  and  the  most  practical,  firm  method  of 
getting  them  out  of  the  way  (thousands  of  them  at  once,  some- 
times, with  one  hand)  is  to  have  something  so  big  to  live  for 
that  all  the  things  that  would  like  to  get  in  the  way,  and  would 
like  to  look  important,  look,  when  one  thinks  of  it,  suddenly 
small. 

The  distinctive,  preeminent,  official  business  for  the  next 
four  years,  of  making  small  things  in  this  country  look  small 


PRESIDENT  WILSON  AND  MOSES  453 

and  of  gently,  quietly  making  small  men  feel  small,  has  been 
assigned  by  our  people  recently,  to  Mr.  Woodrow  Wilson, 

Now  it  naturally  seems  to  some  of  us,  the  best  way  for  Mr. 
Wilson's  government  to  do  in  getting  the  Trusts  to  give  up 
lying  and  stealing,  is  going  to  be  to  place  before  them  quietly  a 
few  really  big,  interesting,  equally  exciting  things  that  Trusts 
can  do,  and  then  dare  them,  as  in  some  great  game  or  tourna- 
ment of  skill  —  all  the  people  looking  on  —  dare  them,  challenge 
them  like  great  men,  to  do  them. 

There  are  three  ideas  President  Wilson  may  have  of  the 
government's  getting  people  to  be  good. 

First,  not  letting  people  be  bad.     (Moses.) 

Second,  being  good  for  them.     (Karl  Marx.) 

Third,  letting  them  be  good  themselves.     (Any  Democrat.) 

The  first  of  these  ideas  means  government  by  Prison.  The 
second,  means  government  by  Usurpation,  that  is,  the  moment 
a  man  amounts  to  enough  to  choose  to  do  right  or  do  wrong  of 
his  own  free  will,  the  moment  he  is  a  man,  in  other  words,  being 
so  afraid  of  him  and  of  I'li  being  a  man,  that  we  all,  in  a  kind 
of  panic,  shove  into  h's  life  and  live  it  for  him — this  is  Socialism, 
a  scared  machine  that  scared  people  have  invented  foi  not 
letting  people  choose  to  do  right  because  they  may  choose  to 
do  wrong. 

The  third,  letting  people  be  good  themselves,  letting  them 
be  self -controlling,  self-respecting,  self-expressing  or  voluntarily 
good  people,  is  democracy,  a  machine  for  letting  men  be  men 
by  trying  it. 

Moses  was  the  inventor  of  a  kind  of  national  moral-brake 
system,  a  machine  for  stopping  people  nine  times  out  of  ten. 
The  question  that  faces  President  Wilson  just  now,  while  the 
world  looks  on  is,  "Is  a  government  or  is  it  not  a  moral-brake 
system  —  a  machine  for  stopping  people  nine  times  out  of  ten?  " 

There  is  a  considerable  resemblance  between  Moses'  position 
and  the  new  President's  in  the  United  States.  When  Moses 
looked  around   on  the  things   he   saw  the   men  abound   him 


454  CROWDS 

doing,  and  took  the  ground  that  at  least  nine  out  of  ten  of  the 
things  should  be  stopped,  he  was  academically  correct.  And 
so,  also.  President  Wilson,  gazing  at  the  business  of  this  country 
to-day,  at  nine  out  of  ten  of  the  humdrum  thoughtless  things 
that  trusts  and  corporations  have  been  doing,  will  be  academi- 
cally correct  in  telling  them  to  stop,  in  having  his  little,  new, 
helpless,  unproved,  adolescent  government  stand  up  before  all 
the  people  and  speak  in  loud,  beautiful,  clear  accents  and  (with 
its  left  fist  full  of  prisons,  fines,  lawyers,  of  forty-eight  legisla- 
tures all  talking  at  once)  bring  down  its  right  fist  as  a  kind  of 
gavel  on  the  world  and  say  to  these  men,  before  all  the  nations, 
that  nine  of  the  things  they  are  doing  must  be  stopped  and  that 
one  of  the  things,  if  they  happen  to  able  be  to  think  out  some 
way  of  keeping  on  doing  it  —  nobody  will  hurt  them. 

But  the  question  before  President  Wilson,  to-day,  with  all  our 
world  looking  on,  is  not  whether  he  would  be  right  in  entering 
upon  a  career  of  stopping  people.  The  real  and  serious  question 
is,  does  stopping  people  stop  them?  And  if  stopping  people 
does  not  stop  them,  what  will.'* 

Perhaps  the  way  for  a  government  to  stop  people  from  doing 
things  they  are  doing,  is  to  tell  them  the  things  it  wants  done. 
A  government  that  does  not  express  what  it  wants,  that  has 
not  given  a  masterful,  clear,  inspired  statement  of  what  it 
wants  —  a  government  that  has  only  tried  to  say  what  it  does 
not  want,  is  not  a  government. 

The  next  business  of  a  government  is  a  statement  of  what 
it  wants. 

The  problem  of  a  government  is  essentially  a  problem  of 
statement. 

How  shall  this  statement  be  made? 


CHAPTER  TV 
THE  PRESIDENT  SAYS  YES  AND  NO 

IT  WAS  not  merely  because  the  seventh  commandment  was 
negative,  but  because  it  was  abstract  that  David  found  it  so 
hard  to  keep.  If  the  seventh  commandment  (Hke  Uriah's  wife) 
could  have  had  deep  blue  eyes  or  could  have  been  beautiful 
to  look  upon,  and,  on  a  particular  day  in  a  particular  place, 
could  have  been  bathing  in  a  garden,  David  would  have  found 
keejiing  it  a  very  different  matter.  The  tendency  to  make  a 
statue  of  purity  as  a  lovely  female  figure  carries  us  a  little 
further  in  moral  evolution,  than  the  moral  statement  that  Moses 
had  managed  to  get,  and  it  was  further  toward  the  concrete, 
but  it  was  not  far  enough  for  a  real  artist  or  man  who  does 
things. 

One  of  the  things  about  the  real  artist  that  makes  him  an 
artist,  is  that  he  is  always  and  always  has  been  and  always  will 
be  profoundly  dissatisfied  with  a  statue  of  a  female  figure  as  an 
emblem  of  purity.  He  challenges  the  world,  he  challenges  God, 
he  challenges  himself,  he  challenges  the  men  and  women  about 
him  when  he  is  being  put  off  with  a  Statue  as  an  emblem  of 
purity.  He  demands,  searches  out,  interprets,  creates  some- 
thing concrete  and  living  to  express  his  idea  of  purity. 

How  can  President  Wilson,  in  getting  the  Trusts  not  to  be 
corrupt,  in  trying  to  win  them  —  how  can  President  Wilson 
make  the  law  alluring  ."^  How  can  he  make  the  People  have  a 
Low  Voice  .^ 

A  great  deal  if  not  nearly  everything  depends  in  tempting 
business  men  to  be  good,  upon  the  tone  in  which  they  are 
addressed.     Everj'  government,  like  every  man,  soon  comes  to 

455 


456  CROWDS 

have  its  own  characteristic  tone  in  addressing  the  people. 
And,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  is  almost  always  the  tone  in  a 
government,  like  the  voice  in  a  man,  which  tells  us  the 
most  definitely  what  it  is  like,  and  is  the  most  intimate  and 
effective  expression  of  what  it  wants  and  is  the  most  practical 
way  of  getting  what  it  wants.  Everybody  has  noticed  that 
a  man's  voice  works  harder  for  him,  works  more  to  the  point 
for  him  in  getting  what  he  wants  than  his  words  do.  It  is 
his  voice  that  makea  people  know  him,  that  makes  them 
know  he  means  what  he  says.  It  is  his  voice  that  tells  them 
■whether  he  is  in  the  habit  of  meaning  what  he  says,  and  it 
is  his  voice  that  tells  them  v.'hether  he  is  in  habit  of  getting 
what  he  wants,  and  of  knowing  what  to  do  with  what  he  wants 
when  he  gets  it. 

A  government  does  not  need  to  say  very  much  if  it  has  the 
right  tone. 

The  tone  of  a  government  is  the  government. 

If  President  Wilson  is  going  to  succeed  in  tempting  business 
men  to  be  good,  he  is  going  to  do  it,  some  of  us  think,  by  depend- 
ing on  three  principles. 

These  three  principles,  like  all  live,  active  principles,  may  be 
stated  as  three  principles  or  as  three  personal  traits. 

First,  by  being  affirmative.  (Isaiah,  in  distinction  from 
Moses.) 

Second,  by  being  concrete.     (Bathsheba.) 

Third,  by  being  specific,  by  seeing"  the  universal  in  the  partic- 
ular.    (Like  any  artist  or  man  who  does  things.) 

The  value  of  being  affirmative  and  the  value  of  being  con- 
crete have  already  been  touched  upon.  There  remains  the 
value  of  being  specific. 

Possibly,  in  this  present  happy  hour,  when  our  country  has 
grown  suddenly  sensible  and  has  become  practical  enough  to 
pick  out  at  last,  once  more,  a  President  with  a  real  serious  work- 
ing sense  of  humour,  even  a  sense  of  humour  about  himself,  it 
may  not  be  considered  disrespectful  if  I  continue  a  little  longer 


THE  PRESIDENT  SAYS  YES  AND  NO         457 

dropping  in  on  the  Government,  and  saying  what  I  have  to  say 
in  a  few  plain  and  homely  words. 

The  trouble  with  most  people  in  being  economical  with  their 
money  is,  that  when  they  spend  it,  they  spend  it  on  something 
in  particular,  and  when  they  save  it,  they  try  to  save  it  in  a  kind 
of  general  way.  The  same  principle  applies  to  doing  right.  It 
is  because  when  people  do  right,  they  do  it  in  a  kind  of  general 
pleasant,  abstract  way,  and  when  they  do  wrong  they  always 
do  something  in  particular,  that  they  are  so  Wicked. 

A  man  will  do  almost  anything  to  save  his  life  at  a  particular 
place  and  at  a  particular  time,  say  at  ten  o'clock  to-morrow 
morning,  if  he  is  drowning,  but  if  he  has  a  year  to  save  it  in, 
a  year  of  controlling  his  appetites,  of  daily,  detailed  mastering 
of  his  spirit,  of  not  taking  a  piece  of  mince  pie,  of  stopping  his 
work  in  time  and  of  going  to  bed  early,  he  will  die. 

It  is  easier  when  one  is  going  under  water  for  the  third  time 
and  sees  a  rope,  to  stretch  just  one  inch  more  and  grasp  the 
rope,  reach  up  to  forty  more  years  of  one's  life,  all  concentrated 
for  one  on  the  tip  of  a  rope,  than  it  is  to  spread  out  saving  one's 
life  over  a  whole  year,  365  breakfasts,  365  luncheons,  365 
dinners,  33,365  moments  of  anger,  of  reckless  worry,  of  remorse, 
of  self-pity,  40,000  of  despair  and  round  up  with  a  swing  at  the 
end  of  one's  year  at  the  tiptop  of  one's  being,  as  if  it  had  only 
taken  five  minutes.  And  yet  it  is  only  an  act  of  the  creative 
imagination  of  seeing  the  whole,  of  having  a  happy,  daily, 
detailed  spectacle  of  the  end  in  view,  that  is,  of  the  part  in  its 
setting  of  the  whole  —  going  without  a  piece  of  mince  pie. 
If  one  could  only  make  one's  self  see  the  piece  of  mince  pie  as  it 
is,  it  would  not  be  difficult.  If  one  could  see  it  on  the  plate  there 
and  see  the  not  taking  it  as  a  little  wedge-shaped  rivet,  a  Uttle 
triangular  link  of  coupling  in  the  chain  that  keeps  one  holding 
on  forty  years  longer  to  this  planet,  a  piece  of  mince  pie  left  on  a 
[)late  would  become  a  Vision. 

This  seems  to  be  the  principle  that  works  best  in  getting 
other  people  to  be  good. 


458  CROWDS 

Perhaps  the  President  will  succeed  in  getting  Trusts  to  be 
good,  by  taking  hold  of  specific  Trusts,  one  by  one,  and  setting 
them  —  all  mankind  looking  on  —  in  the  nation's  vision,  setting 
them  even  in  their  own  vision  —  taking  the  Trusts  that  thought 
they  had  got  what  they  wanted,  making  them  stand  up  and  look 
(in  some  great  public  lighted  place)  at  what  pathetic,  tragical 
failures  they  are,  letting  them  see  that  what  their  Trust  had 
wanted  all  along,  if  it  had  only  thought  about  it,  was  not  success 
one  went  to  jail  for  —  success  by  getting  the  best  out  of  the 
most  people,  but  success  by  serving  the  most  people  the  best. 

A  great  many  of  us  in  America  have  been  exercising  our  minds 
for  a  long  time  now  about  the  eagerness  of  the  Trusts,  and  the 
trouble  we  were  going  to  have  in  curbing  the  eagerness  of  the 
Trusts. 

Sometimes  I  have  wondered  if,  after  all,  it  was  our  minds  we 
were  exercising,  for  when  one  sits  down  seriously  to  think  of  it, 
it  is  the  eagerness  of  the  Trusts  that  is  the  most  hopeful  thing 
about  them. 

What  is  the  matter  with  our  American  Trusts,  perhaps,  is 
not  and  never  has  been,  their  eagerness,  but  their  eagerness  for 
things  that  they  did  not  want,  and  for  things  that  almost  every- 
body is  coming  to  see  that  they  did  not  want. 

The  moment  that  the  eagerness  of  our  American  Trusts  is  an 
eagerness  for  things  that  they  really  want,  the  Trusts  will  be 
seen  piling  over  each  other's  heels,  asking  the  government  to 
please  investigate  them.  The  more  they  can  get  the  people 
to  know  about  them  and  about  their  eagerness,  the  more  the 
people  will  trust  them  and  deal  with  them. 

All  that  we  have  been  waiting  for  is  a  government  that  sees 
the  part  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  whole,  which  will  take 
up  a  few  specific  Trusts  and  be  specific  enough  with  them  to 
make  them  think,  think  hard  what  they  really  want,  and  what 
their  real  eagerness  is  about,  and  the  entire  face  of  modern 
business  will  change.  First  the  expression  will  change  and  then 
the  face  itself. 


THE  PRESIDENT  SAYS  YES  AND  NO         459 

The  moment  it  is  found  that  the  government  is  a  specific 
government,  all  the  trusts  that  know  what  they  really  want  and 
know  what  they  really  are  doing,  will  want  to  be  investigated, 
because  they  will  want  everybody  to  know  that  they  know. 
In  case  of  the  trusts  that  do  not  know  what  they  want  and  that 
do  not  know  what  they  are  doing,  the  government  will  just  step 
in,  of  course,  and  investigate  them  until  they  find  out. 

A  specific  government  will  not  need  to  be  specific  many  times. 

It  takes  up  a  particular  Trust  in  its  hand,  turns  it  over  quietly, 
empties  its  contents  out  before  the  people  and  says  to  every- 
body, "This  particular  Trust  you  see  here  has  tried  to  be  a  kind 
of  Trust,  which  it  found  out  afterward,  it  did  not  want  to  be. 
It  is  the  kind  of  Trust  whose  officers  hide  their  faces  when  they 
think  of  what  it  was  that  they  thought  that  they  thought  that 
they  wanted     .     .     . 

"These  men  you  see  here,  forty  silent  nations  looking  on, 
hundreds  and  thousands  of  self-respecting,  self-supporting, 
public-serving,  creative,  successful  business  men,  whom  all  the 
world  envies  looking  on,  do  hereby  beg  to  declare  to  all  business 
men  who  know  them  and  to  the  people,  that  they  did  not  ever 
really  want  these  things  for  themselves  that  their  business  says 
or  seems  to  say  they  wanted. 

"They  wish  to  ask  the  public  to  put  themselves  in  their  places 
and  to  refuse  to  believe  that  they  deliberately  sat  do\N-n, 
seriously  thought  it  all  out,  that  they  had  planned  to  express  to 
everybody  what  their  natures  really  were  in  a  blind,  brutal,  fool- 
ish business  like  this  which  we  have  just  been  showing  you. 
They  beg  to  have  it  believed  that  their  business  misrepresents 
them,  that  it  misrepresents  what  they  want,  and  they  ask  to 
be  again  admitted  to  the  good-will,  the  hope  and  forgive- 
ness, the  companionship  of  a  great  people. 

"They  declare"  (the  government  vnW  go  on)  "that  they  are 
not  the  men  they  seem.  They  are  merely  men  in  a  hurry. 
They  want  it  understood  that  they  have  merely  hurried  so 
fast  and  hurried  so  long  that  they  now  wake  up  at  last  only  to 


460  CROWDS 

see,  see  with  this  terrific  plainness  what  it  really  is  that  has  been 
happening  to  them  all  their  lives,  viz.:  for  forty,  fifty,  or  sixty 
years  they  have  merely  forgot  who  they  were  and  overlooked 
what  they  were  like. 

"  In  hurrying,  too,  it  is  only  fair  to  say  they  have  had  to  use 
machines  to  hurry  with  and  unconsciously,  year  by  year,  associ- 
ating almost  exclusively  with  machines,  their  machines  (pump 
handles,  trip-hammers,  hydraulic  drills,  steam  shovels  and 
cranes  and  cash  registers)  have  grown  into  them. 

"  This  is  the  way  it  has  happened.  'Let  the  nation  be  merciful 
to  them,'  the  government  will  then  say,  and  dismiss  the 
subject. " 


What  our  President  seems  to  be  for  in  America,  is  to  do  up  a 
nation  in  one  specific,  particular  man  who  expresses  everybody. 

This  man  deals  with  each  other  specific  man,  his  aggressions 
and  services,  as  a  nation  would  if  a  nation  could  be  one  specific 
man. 

The  President  of  the  United  States  is  the  Comptroller  of  the 
people's  vision.  By  seeing  a  part  and  dealing  with  a  part  as  a 
part  of  a  whole,  he  governs  the  people. 

He  is  the  Chancellor  of  the  People's  Attention. 

The  business  of  being  a  President  is  the  business  of  focusing 
ihe  vision,  of  flooding  the  whole  desire  or  will  of  a  people  around 
a  man  and  letting  him  have  the  light  of  it,  to  see  what  he  is 
doing  by,  and  to  be  seen  by,  while  he  is  doing  it. 

The  corporations  have  expressed  or  focused  the  employers 
of  labour.  The  Labour  Unions  have  focused  or  expressed  the 
will  of  the  labourers,  and  the  government  focuses  and  expresses 
the  will  of  the  consumers,  of  the  people  as  a  whole,  rich  and  poor, 
so  that  Labour  and  Capital,  both  listen  to  It,  understand  It 
and  act  on  It. 

The  way  to  deal  with  a  specific  sin  is  to  flood  it  around  with 
the  general  vision.     Then  it  does  not  need  to  be  dealt  with. 


THE  PRESIDENT  SAYS  YES  AND  NO         461 

Then  strangely,  softly,  and  almost  before  we  know  —  out  there 
in  the  Light,  it  automatically  deals  with  itself. 

When  the  Government  takes  hold  quietly  of  the  National 
Cash  Register  Company,  turns  it  up,  empties  its  contents  out, 
— all  its  methods  and  its  motives  —  and  all  the  things  It  thought 
It  wanted,  and  then  proceeds  to  put  its  president  and  twenty- 
nine  of  its  officers  into  jail,  my  readers  will  perhaps  point  out  to 
me  that  this  action  of  the  government  as  a  method  of  tempting 
people  to  be  good,  while  it  may  have  the  virtue  of  being  concrete 
and  the  virtue  of  being  specific,  certainly  does  not  have  the  other 
virtue  that  I  have  laid  down,  the  virtue  of  being  affirmative. 
"Certainly"  they  will  say  "there  is  not  anything  affirmative 
about  putting  twenty-nine  big  business  men  in  jail."  Many 
people  would  call  it  the  most  magnificently  negative  thing  a 
President  could  have  done.     Moses  himself  would  have  done  it. 

It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  Moses  would  have  done  it,  or 
that  it  was  essentially  negative.  It  could  not  unfairly  be 
claimed  that  in  spite  of  its  negative  look  on  the  surface,  it  was 
the  most  massive,  significant,  crushing  affirmation  that  a 
great  people  has  made  for  years. 

By  putting  the  twenty-nine  officers  of  the  National  Cash 
Register  Company  in  jail,  the  American  people  affirmed  around 
the  world  the  nation's  championship  of  the  men  that  had  been 
defeated  in  the  competition  with  the  National  Cash  Register 
Company.  They  affirmed  that  these  men  who  were  not 
afraid  of  the  National  Cash  Register  Company  because  they 
were  bigger,  and  who  stood  up  to  them  and  fought  them,  were 
the  kind  of  men  Americans  wanted  to  be  like,  and  that  the 
officers  of  the  National  Cash  Register  Company  were  the  kind 
of  men  Americans  did  not  want  to  be  like,  would  not  do 
business  with,  would  not  tolerate,  would  not  envy,  would  not 
live  on  the  same  continent  with,  unless  they  were  kept  in  jail. 

The  President  of  the  United  States,  sitting  in  Washington, 
at  the  head  of  this  vast  affirmative  and  assertive  continent, 
indicted  the  Cash  Register  Company,  that  is,  by  a  slight  pointcl 


462  CROWDS 

negative  action,  by  pushing  back  a  button  he  turned  on  the 
great  chandelier  of  a  nation  and  flooded  a  nation  with  Hght. 
We,  the  American  people,  suddenly,  all  in  a  flash,  looked  into 
each  other's  faces  and  knew  what  we  were  like. 

We  had  hoped  we  believed  in  human  nature,  and  in  brave 
men  and  in  men  against  machines  but  we  could  not  prove  it. 

Suddenly,  we  stood  in  a  blaze  of  truth  about  ourselves. 
Suddenly,  we  could  again  look  with  our  old  stir  of  joy  at  our 
national  Flag.     If  we  liked,  we  could  swing  our  hats. 

Perhaps  I  should  speak  for  myself,  but  I  had  been  trying  to 
get  this  news  for  years.  It  is  news  I  have  wanted  to  live  with 
and  do  business  with.  I  have  been  trying  to  get  my  question 
answered.     What  are  the  American  people  really  like? 

The  President  points  at  the  National  Cash  Register  Company 
and  I  find  out.     All  the  people  find  out. 

In  the  last  analysis,  the  masterful,  shrewd,  practical,  and 
constructive  part  of  being  a  President  of  the  United  States  — 
the  thing  in  the  business  of  being  a  President  that  keeps  the 
position  from  being  a  position  which  only  the  second  rate  or 
No  type  of  man  would  have  time  to  take,  is  the  fact  that  the 
President  is  the  Head  Advertising  Manager  of  the  United 
States,  conducting  a  huge  advertising  campaign  of  what 
Americans  really  want. 

He  takes  up  the  National  Cash  Register  Company,  picks  out 
its  twenty-nine  officers,  makes  it  a  bill  board  sky-high  across 
the  country.  "Here  are  the  kind  of  business  men  that  the  peo- 
ple of  the  United  States  do  not  want,  and  here  are  the  kind  of 
men  that  we  do!" 

The  thing  that  makes  indicting  a  trust  a  positive  and  affirma- 
tive act  is  the  advertising  in  it. 

Gladstone  once  wrote  a  postcard  about  a  little  book  of 
Marie  Bashkirtseff's. 

Twenty  nations  read  the  Httle  book. 

Every  now  and  then  one  watches  a  man  or  sees  a  truth  that 
would  make  a  nation.     One  wishes  one  had  some  way  of  being 


THE  PRESIDENT  SAYS  YES  AND  NO         463 

the  sort  of  person  or  being  in  the  kind  of  place  where  one  could 
make  a  nation  out  of  it. 

One  thinks  it  would  be  passing  wonderful  to  be  President  of 
the  United  States.  It  would  be  like  having  a  great  bell  up 
over  the  world  that  one  could  reach  up  to  and  ring!  But  it  is 
better  than  that.  One  touches  a  button  at  one's  desk  if  one 
is  President  of  the  United  States,  and  a  nation  looks  up.  He 
whispers  to  twenty  thousand  newspapers/'Take  your  eyes  away 
a  minute,"  he  says,  "from  Jack  Johnson  and  Miss  Elkin's 
engagement,  and  look,  oh,  look,  ye  People,  here  is  a  man  in  this 
world  like  this !  He  has  been  in  the  world  all  this  while  without 
our  suspecting  it.  Did  you  know  there  was  or  could  be  any- 
where a  man  like  this.''  And  here  is  a  man  like  this!  Which 
do  you  prefer?     Which  are  you  really  like.?" 

There  is  nothing  really  regal  or  imperial  in  a  man,  nothing 
that  makes  a  man  feel  suddenly  like  a  whole  Roman  Empire 
all  by  himself,  in  1913,  like  saying  "Look!  Look!" 

Sometimes  I  think  about  it.  Of  course  I  could  take  a  great 
reel  of  paper  and  sit  down  with  my  fountain  pen,  say  Look  for  a 
mile,  "Look!  look!  look!  look!!! — President  Wilson  says  it  once 
and  without  exclamation  points.  Skyscrapers  listen  to  him! 
Great  cities  rise  and  lift  themselves  and  smite  the  world.  And 
the  faint,  sleepy  little  villages  stir  in  their  dreams. 

Moses  said,  "Thou  shall  not!"  President  Wilson  says, 
"Look!" 

Perhaps  if  Moses  had  had  twenty  thousand  newspapers  like 
twenty  thousand  field-glasses  that  he  could  hand  out  every 
morning  and  lend  to  people  to  look  through  —  he  would  not 
have  had  to  say,  "Thou  shall  not. " 

The  precise  measure  of  the  governing  power  a  man  can  get 
out  of  the  position  of  being  President  of  the  United  States 
to-day  is  the  amount  of  advertising  for  the  people,  of  the 
people,  and  by  the  people  he  can  crowd  every  morning,  every 
week,  into  the  papers  of  the  country. 

A  President  becomes  a  great  President  in  proportion  as  he 


464  CROWDS 

acts  authoritatively,  tactfully,  economically,  ai  d  persistently 
as  the  Head  Advertising  Manager  of  the  ideals  of  the  people. 
He  is  the  great  central,  official  editor  of  what  the  people  are 
trying  to  find  out  —  of  a  nation's  news  about  itself. 

By  his  being  the  President  of  what  people  think,  by  his  dictat- 
ing the  subjects  the  people  shall  take  up,  by  his  sorting  'out 
the  men  whom  the  people  shall  notice,  this  great  ceaseless  Meet- 
ing of  ninety  million  men  we  call  the  United  States  —  comes 
to  order. 


CHAPTER  V 
THE  PRESIDENT  SAYS  "LOOK!*' 

OUR  American  President,  if  one  merely  reads  what  the  Con- 
stitution says  about  him,  is  a  rather  weak-looking  character. 

The  founders  of  the  country  did  not  intend  him  to  be  anybody 
in  particular  —  if  it  could  be  helped.  They  were  discouraged 
about  allowing  governments  to  be  eflScient.  Not  very  much 
that  was  constructive  to  do  was  handed  over  to  him.  And 
the  most  important  power  they  thought  it  would  do  for  him  to 
have  was  the  veto  or  power  to  say  "No." 

Possibly  if  our  fathers  had  believed  in  liberty  more  they 
would  have  allowed  more  people  to  have  some;  or  if  they  had 
believed  in  democracy  more,  or  trusted  the  people  more,  they 
would  have  thought  it  would  do  to  let  them  have  leaders,  but 
they  had  just  got  away.  They  felt  timid  about  human 
nature  and  decided  that  the  less  constructive  the  government 
was  and  the  less  chance  the  government  had  to  be  concrete,  to 
interpret  a  people,  to  make  opportunities  and  turr.  out  events, 
the  better. 

Looked  at  at  first  sight  no  more  elaborate,  impenetrable, 
water-tight  arrangement  for  keeping  a  government  from  letting 
in  an  idea  or  ever  having  one  of  its  own  or  ever  doing  anything 
for  anybody,  could  have  been  concci  /ed  than  the  Constitution 
of  the  United  States,  as  the  average  President  interprets  it. 

Each  branch  of  the  government  is  arranged  carefully  to  keep 
any  other  branch  from  doing  anything,  and  then  the  people, 
every  four  years,  look  the  whole  country  over  for  some  new  man 
they  think  will  probably  leave  them  alone  more  than  anybody 
—  and  put  him  in  for  President. 

465 


466  CROWDS 

Looking  at  it  narrowly  and  by  itself,  all  that  a  President 
selected  like  this  could  ever  expect  in  America  to  put  in  his 
time  on,  would  seem  to  be  —  being  the  country's  most  impor- 
tantly helpless  man  —  the  man  who  has  been  given  the  honour 
of  being  a  somewhat  more  prominent  failure  in  America  than 
any  one  else  would  be  allowed  to  be. 

He  stops  people  for  four  years.  Other  people  stop  him  for 
four  years.  Then  with  a  long  happy  sigh,  at  the  end  of  his 
term,  he  slips  back  into  real  life  and  begins  to  do  things. 

This  has  been  the  more  or  less  sedately  disguised  career  of 
the  typical  American  President.  Merely  reading  the  Con- 
stitution or  the  lives  of  the  Presidents,  without  looking  at  what 
has  been  happening  to  the  habits  of  the  people  in  the  last  few 
years,  we  might  all  be  asking  to-day,  "What  is  there  that  is 
really  constructive  that  President  Wilson  can  do.'"  What  is 
there  that  is  going  to  prevent  him,  with  all  that  moral  earnest- 
ness dammed  up  in  him,  that  sense  of  duty,  that  Presbyterian 
sense  of  other  people's  duties  —  what  is  there  that  is  going  to 
prevent  him,  with  his  school-book  habits,  his  ideals,  his 
volumes  of  American  history,  from  being  a  teachery  or  preach- 
ery  person  —  a  kind  of  Schoolmaster  or  Official  Clergyman  to 
Business? 

News. 

The  one  really  important  and  imperative  thing  to  the  people 
of  this  country  to-day  is  News.  In  spite  of  newspapers,  authors, 
College  presidents.  Bank  presidents.  Socialist  agitators.  Bill 
Heywoods,  and  Trusts,  the  people  are  bound  to  get  this  news, 
and  any  man  who  is  so  placed  by  his  prominence  that  he  can 
scoop  up  the  news  of  a  country,  hammer  its  news  together 
into  events  the  papers  will  report,  express  news  in  the  laws, 
build  news  into  men  who  can  make  laws  and  unmake  laws,  any 
man  who  is  so  placed  that  directly  or  indirectly  he  takes 
news,  forces  it  in  by  hydraulic  pressure  where  people  see 
it  doing  things,  who  takes  news  and  crowds  it  into  courts, 
crowds  news  into  lawyers  and  into  legislatures,   pries   some 


THE  PRESIDENT  SAYS  "LOOK!"  467 

of  it  even  into  newspapers,  can  have,  the  ordinary  American 
says  to-day,  as  much  leeway  in  this  government  as  he  Hkes. 

The  ordinary  American  has  never  been  able  to  understand 
the  objection  important  people  have  —  that  nearly  everybody 
has  (except  ordinary  people)  to  news  —  especially  editors  and 
publishers. 

It  is  an  old  story.  Every  one  must  have  noticed  it.  One 
set  of  people  in  this  world,  always  from  the  beginning,  trying  to 
climb  up  on  the  housetops  to  tell  news,  and  another  set  of  people 
hurrying  up  always  and  saying,  "Hush,  Hush!"  Some  days  it 
seems,  when  I  read  the  papers,  that  I  hear  half  the  world 
saying  under  its  breath,  a  vast,  stentorian,  "Shoo!  shoo!  SHSH! 
SHSH!" 

Then  I  realize  I  live  in  an  editor's  world.  I  am  expected  to 
be  in  the  world  that  editors  have  decided  on  the  whole  to  let 
me  be  in. 

Of  course  I  did  not  know  what  to  do  at  first  when  this  came 
over  me. 

I  naturally  began  to  try  to  think  of  some  way  of  cutting 
across  lots,  of  climbing  up  to  News. 

I  looked  at  all  the  neat  little  park  paths,  with  all  those  artistic 
curves  of  truth  on  them  the  editors  have  laid  out  for  me  and  for 
all  of  us.  Then  I  looked  at  the  world  and  asked  myself,  "Who 
are  the  men  in  this  world,  if  any,  who  are  able  to  walk  on  the 
Grass,  who  cut  across  the  little  park  paths  when  they  like?  " 

And  as  fate  would  have  it  (it  was  during  the  Roosevelt 
administration),  the  first  two  men  I  came  on  who  seemed  to  be 
stamping  about  in  the  newspapers  quite  a  little  as  they  liked 
were  the  Prime  Minister  of  England  and  the  President  of  the 
United  States. 

Just  how  much  governing  can  a  President  do 

How  many  columns  a  day  is  he  good  for,  how  many  acres  of 
attention  every  morning  in  the  papers  of  the  country  —  all  these 
white  fields  of  attention,  these  acres  of  other  people's  thoughts, 
can  he  cover? 


468  CROWDS 

How  many  sticks  a  day  can  he  make  compositors  set  up  of 
what  he  thinks? 

How  many  square  miles  of  the  people's  thoughts  can  he 
spread  out  at  breakfast  tables,  lift  up  in  a  thousand  thousand 
trolleys  before  their  faces? 

I  have  seen  the  white  fields  of  attention  filled  with  the 
footprints  of  his  thoughts,  of  his  will,  of  his  desires! 

I  have  seen  that  the  President  is  the  Editor  of  that  vast, 
anonymous,  silent  newspaper,  written  all  the  night,  written  all 
the  day,  and  softly  published  across  a  country  —  the  news- 
paper of  people's  thoughts. 

I  have  seen  the  vision  of  the  forests  he  has  cast  down,  ground 
into  headlines,  into  editorials,  into  news.  Mountains  and  hills 
are  laid  ')are  to  say  what  he  thinks.  Thousands  of  presses  throb 
softly  &.nd  the  white  reels  of  wood  pulp  fly  into  speech. 
Thousands  of  miles  of  paper  wet  with  the  thoughts  of  a  people 
roll  dimly  under  ground  in  the  night. 

The  Presidei?t  is  saying  Look!  in  the  night! 

The  newsboys  hasten  out  in  the  dawn.  They  cry  in  the 
streets ! 


CHAPTER    VI 
THE  PEOPLE  SAY  "WHO  ARE  YOU?" 

IF  NEWS  is  governing,  how  does  the  President  do  his 
governing? 

By  being  News,  himself. 

By  using  his  appointing  power  and  putting  other  men  who 
are  News  Themselves,  news  about  American  human  nature 
—  where  all  the  people  will  see  it. 

By  telling  the  people  directly  (when  he  feels  especially  asked) 
news  about  what  is  happening  in  his  mind  —  news  about 
what  he  believes. 

By  telling  the  people  sometimes  (as  candidly  as  he  can 
without  giving  the  people's  enemies  a  chance  to  stop  him), 
what  he  is  going  to  do  next,  sketching  out  in  order  of  time, 
and  in  order  of  importance,  his  program  of  issues. 

By  telling  the  people  news  about  their  best  business  men, 
the  business  men  and  inventors  who,  in  their  daily  business, 
free  the  energies,  unshackle  the  minds  and  emancipate  the 
genius  of  the  people. 

By  telling  these  business  men  news  about  the  people  —  and 
interpreting  the  people  to  them. 

It  is  by  being  news  to  the  people  himself  that  all  the  othe» 
news  a  President  can  get  into  his  government  counts. 

A  man  is  a  man  according  to  the  amount  of  news  there  is 
in  him. 

There  are  twenty  personal  traits  in  a  President  which  of 
themselves  would  all  be  national  news  of  the  first  importance 
if  he  had  them.     The  bare  fact  that  a  President  could  have 

469 


470  CROWDS 

certain  traits  at  all  and  still  get  to  be  a  President  in  this  country, 
would  be  news. 

One  of  the  most  important  facts  about  news  is  that  while  it 
can  be  distributed  by  machines,  machines  cannot  make  it, 
and  as  a  rule  they  do  not  understand  it.  Important  and 
critical  news  is  almost  always  fresh  and  made  by  hand  the 
first  time.  Most  of  the  popular  news  as  to  what  is  practical 
in  American  politics  for  the  last  forty  years  has  been  produced 
by  political  machines,  and  of  course  men  who  were  a  good 
deal  like  machines  were  the  best  men  to  finish  the  ideas  off  and 
to  carry  them  out. 

As  a  result  of  course,  all  the  really  big  leaders  for  the  last 
forty  years,  our  most  powerful  and  interesting  personalities 
have  been  shut  out  from  being  President  of  the  United  States. 
The  White  House  was  merely  being  run  as  machinery  and  did 
not  interest  them.  They  watched  it  grinding  its  ideas  faithfully 
out  from  year  to  year  of  what  America  was  like  and  what 
American  politicians  were  like,  and  finally  at  last  in  the  clatter  of 
the  machines  there  rings  out  suddenly  across  the  land  a  shot  that 
no  machinery  had  allowed  for.  Before  any  one  knows  almost 
there  slips  suddenly  by  the  side  door  into  the  W^hite  House  a 
really  interesting  man,  and  suddenly,  all  in  one  minute,  almost, 
this  man  makes  being  President  of  the  United  States  the  most  in- 
teresting lively  and  athletic  feat  in  the  country.  And  now,  ap- 
parently that  the  idea  has  been  worked  out  in  public  before  every- 
body, by  hand,  as  it  were,  that  a  man  can  be  alive  and  interesting 
all  over,  can  have  at  least  a  little  touch  of  news  about  him  and 
still  be  a  President  in  this  country,  another  man  with  some  news 
in  him  has  been  allowed  to  us  and  suddenly  politics  throughout 
all  America  has  become  a  totally  new  revealing  profession,  and 
men,  instead  of  being  selected  because  they  were  blurred  per- 
sonalities, the  ghosts  of  compromises,  would-be  everybodies  — 
men  who  had  not  decided  who  they  were,  and  who  could  not 
settle  down  and  let  people  know  which  of  their  characters 
they  had  hit  on  at  last  to  be  really  theirs,  men  who  had  no 


THE  PEOPLE  SAY  "WHO  ARE  YOU?"         471 

cutting  edge  to  do  things,  screw-drivers  trying  to  be  chisels  — 
were  revealed  to  our  people  at  last  as  vague,  mean,  other- 
worldly persons,  not  fitting  into  our  real  American  world  at  all, 
and  hopelessly  visionary  and  impracticable  in  American  politics. 

And  now  one  more  handmade  man  has  been  allowed  to  us. 

The  machines  run  very  still  in  the  White  House. 

The  people  of  this  country  no  longer  go  by  the  White  House 
on  their  way  to  their  business  and  just  hear  it  humdrumming 
and  humdrumming  behind  the  windows  as  of  yore.  The  nation 
stands  in  crowds  around  the  gates  and  would  like  to  see  in. 
The  people  wonder.  They  wonder  a  million  columns  a  daj 
what  is  inside. 

What  is  inside? 

An  American  who  governs  by  being  news,  himself. 

The  first  thing  that  the  people  demand  from  our  President 
now  is  that  he  shall  be  news  himself.  The  news  that  they 
have  selected  to  know  first  during  the  next  four  years  —  have 
put  into  the  White  House  to  know  first  is  Woodrow  Wilson. 

"Who  are  you,  Woodrow  Wilson,  in  God's  name?"  the 
steeples  and  smoking  chimneys,  the  bells  and  whistles,  the 
Yales  and  Harvards,  and  the  little  country  schools,  the  crowds 
in  the  streets,  and  the  corn  in  the  fields  all  say,  "Who  Are 
You?" 

Then  the  people  listen.  They  listen  to  his  "I  wills"  and 
"I  won'ts"  for  news  about  him.  They  look  for  news  about 
him  in  the  headlines  he  steers  into  the  papers  every  morning, 
in  the  events  he  makes  happen,  in  the  editorials  he  makes  men 
think  of,  in  the  men  he  calls  up  and  puts  on  the  National  Wire 
—  in  all  these,  slowly,  daily,  hourly  they  drink  up  their  long, 
patient,  hopeful  answer  to  their  question,  "Who  Are  You, 
Woodrow  Wilson?  " 


CHAPTER    VII 
THE   PEOPLE    SAY    "WHO   ARE    WE?" 

BUT  if  the  President  governs  jBrst  by  being  news  himself, 
he  governs  second  by  his  appointments,  by  gathering  about 
him  other  men  who  are  news  to  people,  too. 

One  need  not  divide  people  into  good  and  bad,  because  the 
true  line  of  division  between  good  and  bad  instead  of  being 
between  one  man  and  another,  is  apt  to  be  as  a  matter  of  fact 
and  experience  cut  down  through  the  middle  of  each  of  us. 

But  for  the  purposes  of  public  action  and  decision  and  getting 
good  things  done,  this  line  does  seem  to  be  cut  farther  over  in 
the  middle  of  some  of  us,  than  it  is  in  others.  Taking  a  life- 
average  in  any  moral  or  social  engineering  feat,  in  any  correct 
calculation  of  structural  strain,  how  far  over  this  line  cuts 
through  in  a  man,  has  to  be  reckoned  with. 

The  president  by  appointing  certain  men  to  oflBce,  saying 
"I  will"  and  "I  won't"  to  certain  types  of  men,  in  saying  who 
shall  be  studied  by  the  people,  who  shall  be  read  as  documents 
of  our  national  life,  puts,  if  not  the  most  important,  at  least 
the  most  lively  and  telling  news  about  his  admim'stration  into 
print. 

We  watch  our  President  acting  for  us,  telling  us  news 
about  what  we  are  like,  sorting  men  out  around  him  the  way 
ninety  million  people  would  sort  them  out  if  they  were  there 
to  do  it. 

The  President's  appointments  may  be  said  to  be  in  a  way 
the  breath  of  the  nation. 

A  nation  has  to  breathe,  and  the  plain  fact  seems  to  be  that 
certain  kinds  of  people  have  to  be  breathed  out  of  a  nation  and 

472 


THE  PEOPLE  SAY  "WHO  ARE  WE?"         473 

other  kinds  of  people  have  to  be  breathed  in.  The  way  a  Presi- 
dent appoints  men  to  office  is  his  way  of  letting  a  nation  breathe. 
With  all  his  attractive  quahties,  perhaps  it  is  because  Mr. 
Taft  did  not  quite  let  the  nation  breathe,  and  suffocated  it 
a  httle  that  there  came  such  an  outbreak  at  the  end.  Perhaps  it 
is  because  Mr.  Taft  looked  at  Mr.  Ballinger  and  then  looked  at 
Mr.  Pinchot,  all  the  people  of  the  country  all  the  while  looking 
on,  and  said,  "Ballinger  is  the  kind  of  man  our  people  prefer, 
and  Pinchot  is  not,"  that  .the  people  broke  out  so  amazingly,  so 
incredibly,  and  decided  by  such  an  enormous  majority  that  a 
man  who  could  pick  out  men  for  them  like  this  would  not  do 
—  as  things  are  just  now  anyway  —  for  a  President  of  the 
TJnited  States. 


CHAPTER   VIII 
NEWS  ABOUT  US  TO  THE  PRESIDENT 

A  nation  wakes  up  every  morning  and  for  one  minute  before 
it  runs  to  its  work  it  says  to  its  President,  "here  we  are!" 

The  best  a  President  can  do  in  the  way  of  a  plain,  everyday 
acknowledgment  of  the  presence  of  the  people  is  News. 

The  news  that  the  people  are  demanding  from  the  President 
to-day  is  intensely  personal.  It  is  a  kind  of  rough,  butting, 
good-natured  familiarity  a  great  people  has  with  its  President, 
a  little  heedless,  relentless,  like  some  splendid  Child,  ready  to 
forgive  and  expecting  to  be  forgiven,  it  jostles  in  upon  him 
daily,  "Here  we  are!  What  are  you  believing  this  morning? 
Did  you  believe  in  us  yesterday?  Did  you  act  as  if  you  believed 
in  us?  Did  you  get  anybody  to  believe  in  us?  Who  are 
the  men  you  say  are  like  us?  What  are  they  like  this 
morning? 

"We  have  asked  a  hundred  times;  we  can  only  ask  it  once 
more.  How  do  you  think  you  are  turning  out  yourself,  Mr. 
President?  Are  you  what  you  thought  you  would  be?  Do 
you  think  it  is  a  good  time  for  us  to  decide  this  morning  what 
you  are  really  like?  And,  after  all,  Mr.  President  —  if  you 
please  —  who  are  you?  And  once  more,  Mr.  President,  in 
God's  name,  who  are  we?  " 

This  is  always  the  gist  of  what  it  says,  "Who  are  we?" 

It  is  the  people's  main  point,  after  all,  asking  a  President 
who  they  are,  wondering  if  he  can  interpret  them. 

Then  he  shuts  his  door  and  thinks,  or  he  calls  his  Cabinet 
and  thinks. 

Rows  of  little-great  men  file  by  all  day.    They  stand  each 

474 


NEWS  ABOUT  US  TO  THE  PRESIDENT       475 

a  few  minutes  with  his  little  Speck  or  Dot  of  the  People  in  his 
hands,  and  they  say,  "This  is  the  People." 

He  listens. 

It  is  very  hard  to  be  always  President  of  the  People  when  one 
is  listening  and  the  little-great  go  by. 

One  has  to  go  back  a  little,  in  the  night  perhaps,  or  when  one 
is  quite  alone.  He  sees  again  the  Child;  it  is  what  he  is  in 
the  White  House  for,  he  remembers,  to  express  this  dumb  giant, 
this  mighty  Child,  half  weary,  half  glad,  standing  there  by  day 
by  night,  saying,  "WTio  are  we?"  One  would  think  it  would 
be  hard  to  be  glib  with  the  Child. 

Sometimes  it  is  so  deep  and  silent! 

Once  when  It  broke  in  on  Lincoln  in  this  way  and  said,  "  Who 
are  we?"  he  prayed. 


CHAPTER  IX 

NEWS-MEN 

IT  SEEMS  very  difficult  to  get  news  through  as  to  who  we 
really  are  to  a  President.  When  I  look  about  me  and  see  what 
the  President's  ways  are  of  telling  news  about  himself  to  us, 
I  see  that  he  is  not  without  his  advantages.  But  when  I  look 
about  to  see  what  conveniences  we  have  as  a  people  for  telling 
our  President  news  about  us,  I  note  some  curious  thingiS.  The 
fears  of  the  American  people,  the  fears  and  threats  of  labour 
and  capital  are  organized  and  expressed,  but  their  faiths,  their 
wills,  the  things  in  them  that  make  them  go  and  that  make 
them  American,  are  not  organized  and  are  not  expressed. 

The  labour  unions  are  afraid  and  say,  "We  will  not  work," 
to  their  employers,  "You  cannot  make  us  work."  The  Presi- 
dent hears  this.     It  is  about  all  they  say. 

The  capitalists  and  employers  are  afraid  and  they  say,  "We 
will  not  pay,"  "You  cannot  make  us  pay." 

Shall  the  President  act  as  if  these  men  represent  Labor  and 
Capital? 

We  say,  "No." 

Neither  of  these  groups  of  men  express  real  live  American 
labour  or  real  live  characteristic  American  money. 

American  money  is  free,  bold,  manful,  generous  and  courage- 
ous to  a  fault.  American  money  swings  out  in  mighty  enter- 
prises, shrewdly  believing  things,  imperiously  singing  things 
out  of  its  way. 

A  singing  people  want  a  singing  government.  How  is  our 
President  going  to  hear  our  labour  and  our  money  sing? 

Pinchot  expressed  us,  not  Ballinger. 

476 


NEWS-MEN  477 

Mr.  Pinchot  is  no  mere  uplifter  or  missionary.  He  is  an 
artist  in  expressing  America  to  a  President.  If  we  have  a 
President  who  will  not  hsten  to  a  man  Uke  Pinchot,  let  us  try 
a  President  that  will. 

Pinchot  —  an  American  millionaire  with  a  fortune  made 
out  of  forests,  who  is  spending  the  fortune  in  protecting  the 
forests  for  the  nation,  is  the  kind  of  American  Americans  like  to 
set  up  before  a  President  to  say  what  Americans  are  like. 
Millions  of  men  stand  by  Pinchot.  We  like  the  way  he  makes 
money  sing. 

Tom  L.  Johnson  —  an  American  millionaire  who  made  his 
money  in  the  ordinary  humdrum  way,  by  getting  valuable 
street  railway  franchises  out  of  a  city  for  nothing  —  has  the 
courage  to  turn  around,  spend  his  fortune  and  spend  it  all,  in 
keeping  other  people  from  doing  it. 

America  presents  Tom  L.  Johnson  to  a  President  with  its 
compliments  and  says,  "This  is  what  America  is  like." 

It  may  not  look  always  as  if  Tom  L.  Johnson  were  America  — 
America  in  miniature.  But  millions  of  us  say  he  is.  He  makes 
money  sing. 

We  want  a  President  —  millions  of  us  want  him  —  and  this 
is  the  most  important  news  about  us,  who  expects  money  in 
this  country  to  sing. 

We  want  our  money  and  expect  our  money  in  this  country 
to  stop  saying  mean  things  about  us,  things  that  make  us 
ashamed  to  look  a  true  newspaper  in  the  face,  or  one  another 
in  the  face,  and  that  humiliate  us  before  the  world. 


And  now  I  have  come  to  an  awkward  place  in  this  book  where 
I  hope  the  reader  will  help  me  all  he  can. 

There  is  nothing  to  do  but  to  let  out  the  real  truth  and  face 
the  music.  The  fact  is.  Gentle  Reader  —  perhaps  you  have 
suspected  it  all  along  —  that  if  it  had  not  been  for  fear  of 
mixing  my  book  all  up  with  him  and  making  it  a  kind  of  arena 


478  CROWDS 

or  tournament  instead  of  a  book,  I  would  have  mentioned 
ex-President  Roosevelt  before  this.  He  has  been  getting  in  or 
nearly  getting  in  to  nearly  every  chapter  so  far,  but  of  course 
I  knew,  as  any  one  would,  that  he  would  spoil  all  the  calm 
equipoise,  the  quiet  onward  flowing  of  the  Stream  of  Thought, 
and  with  one  chapter  after  the  other,  with  each  as  the  crisis 
came  up,  though  I  scarcely  know  how,  I  have  managed  to  keep 
him  out.  And  now,  oh.  Gentle  Reader,  here  he  is!  I  know 
very  well  that  he  is  in  everything,  and  right  in  the  middle  of 
everything,  and  that  in  a  kind  of  splendid  mixed  happy  up- 
roarious way,  there  somehow  has  to  be  a  great  to-do  the  moment 
he  appears.  The  beautiful  clear  water,  the  lucid  depth  of 
Thought  —  will  all  become  (ah,  I  know  it  too  well.  Gentle 
Reader)  all  thunder  and  spray  and  underneath  the  mighty 
grinding  of  the  wheels  —  the  wheels  of  the  Nation  and  the 
Mowing  Machine  of  Time,  and  in  the  background  —  in  the 
red  background  of  the  Dawn,  there  will  be  the  face  of  Theo- 
dore —  just  the  face  of  Theodore  in  this  book  shining  at  us 
—  readers  and  writer  and  all  —  out  of  a  huge  rosy  mist! 

But  I  have  been  driven  to  it.  The  fact  seems  to  be  that 
I  must  find  at  just  this  point  in  the  book,  if  I  can,  a  word. 
And  the  word  will  have  to  be  a  word,  too,  that  everybody  knows, 
and  that  conveys  a  lively  sense  to  everybody  the  moment  it  is 
used —  of  a  certain  tone  or  quality,  or  hum  or  murmur  of  being. 
No  one  regrets  this  more  than  I,  because  it  is  so  unwieldy 
and  inconvenient  and  always  bulges  out  in  a  sentence  or  a 
book  or  a  nation  more  than  it  was  meant  to,  but  the  word 
ROOSEVELT,  ROOSEVEL  T,  happens  to  be  the  word  that 
people  in  this  country,  and  very  largely  in  other  nations,  and  in 
all  languages  have  chosen  and  are  using  every  day  to  express  to 
one  another  a  certain  American  quality  or  tone  now  abroad  in 
our  world  —  a  certain  hum,  as  one  might  say,  or  whirr  of 
goodness. 

This  particular  hum,  or  whirr  of  goodness,  which  is  instantly 
associated  with  the  word  Roosevelt,  expresses,  except  that  of 


NEWS-MEN  479 

course  it  over-expresses,  a  part  of  the  news  to-day  about 
America  which  we  want  our  President  to  read. 

One  cannot  help  wondering  why  it  is  that  if  one  wanted  to 
express  to  the  largest  number  of  people  in  the  world  a  certain 
quality  of  goodness,  the  word  Roosevelt  would  do  it  best. 

I  am  not  dealing  for  the  purpose  of  this  book  in  what  Mr. 
Roosevelt's  goodness  is  or  whether  it  is  what  he  thinks  it  is. 
We  might  all  disagree  about  that.  I  am  dealing  quite  strictly 
in  this  connection  with  what  even  his  enemies  would  say  is  his 
almost  egregious  success  in  advertising  goodness.  While  we 
might  all  disagree  as  to  his  goodness  being  the  kind  that  he 
or  any  one  ought  to  love,  we  would  not  fail  to  agree  that  it 
is  his  love  of  his  own  goodness,  such  as  it  is,  and  his  holding 
on  to  it,  and  his  love  of  other  people's  and  his  love  of  getting 
his  goodness  and  their  goodness  together,  that  has  made  him 
the  most  unconcealed  person  in  modern  life.  These  quahties 
have  established  him,  with  his  ability  raised  to  the  n***  power 
of  attracting  attention  to  anything  he  likes,  as  the  world's 
greatest  News  Man  —  the  world's  greatest  living  energy  to-day 
in  advertising  what  is  good  and  what  is  bad  in  our  American 
temperament. 

Even  the  people  who  disagree  with  him  or  dislike  him  —  many 
of  them  would  have  to  fall  back  on  using  the  word  roosevelt, 
or  rather  the  verb  to  roosevelt. 

It  does  not  seem  to  be  because  his  goodness  in  itself  is  extra- 
ordinary. It  is  even,  for  that  matter,  in  the  sense  that  anybody 
could  have  it,  or  some  more  just  like  it,  a  little  common. 

What  seems  to  be  uncommon  and  really  distinguished  about 
Mr.  Roosevelt  is  the  way  he  feels  about  his  goodness,  and  the 
way  he  grips  hold  of  it,  and  the  way  he  makes  it  grip  hold  of 
other  people  —  practically  anybody  almost,  who  is  standing 
by.  Even  if  they  are  merely  going  by  in  automobiles,  sometimes 
they  catch  some.  I  do  not  imagine  that  his  worst  enemies, 
however  seriously  they  may  question  the  general  desirability 
or  safety    of   having   so   much  goodness  roosevelting   around, 


480  CROWDS 

would  fail  to  admit  his  own  real  enthusiasm  about  goodness 
anywhere  he  finds  it  indiscriminately,  whether  it  is  his  own  or 
other  people's.  He  grips  hold  of  it,  and  grips  like  a  cable 
car  —  instantly. 

His  enthusiasm  is  so  great  that  many  people  are  nonplussed 
by  it.  The  enthusiasm  must  really  be  in  spite  of  appearances 
about  something  else,  something  wicked  in  behind,  they  think, 
and  not  really  about  goodness.  An  entire  stranger  would  not 
quite  believe  it.  It  would  be  too  original  in  him,  they  would 
say,  or  in  anybody,  to  care  so  about  goodness. 

If  one  could  watch  the  expression  in, Mr.  Roosevelt's  face  or 
his  manner  while  he  is  in  the  act  of  having  a  virtue  and  if  one 
could  not  see  plainly  from  where  one  was,  just  what  it  was  he 
was  doing,  one  would  at  once  conclude  that  it  must  be  some 
vice  he  is  having.  He  looks  happy  and  as  if  it  were  some  stolen 
secret.  There  is  always  that  manner  of  his  when  he  is  caught 
doing  right,  as  if  one  were  to  say  "Now,  at  last,  I  have  got  it!" 
He  does  right  like  a  boy  with  his  mouth  full  of  jam,  and  this 
seems  to  be  true  not  only  when,  with  a  whole  public  following 
and  two  or  three  nations  besides,  and  all  the  newspapers,  he 
goes  off  on  an  orgy  of  righteousness,  makes  the  grand  tour  of 
Europe,  and  has  the  time  of  his  life.  It  is  the  steady-burning 
under  enthusiasm  with  him  all  the  while.  The  spectacle  of 
a  good  man  doing  a  tremendous  good  thing  affects  Theodore 
Roosevelt  like  one  of  the  great  forces  of  nature,  like  Niagara 
Falls,  like  the  screws  of  the  Mauretania,  or  any  other  huge, 
happy  thing  that  is  having  its  way  against  fear;  against  weak- 
ness, or  against  small  terrified  goodness. 

Mr.  Roosevelt  in  doing  right  conveys  the  sense  of  enjoying 
it  so  himself  that  he  has  made  almost  an  art  form  of  public 
righteousness.  He  has  found  his  most  complete,  his  most 
naive,  instinctive  self-expression  in  it,  and  while  we  have  had 
goodness  in  public  men  before,  we  have  had  no  man  who  has 
been  such  an  international  chromo  for  goodness,  who  has  made 
such  a  big,  comfortable  "  He-who-runs-may-read "  bill-poster 


NEWS-MEN  481 

for  doing  right  as  Roosevelt.  Other  men  have  done  things 
that  were  good  to  do,  but  the  very  inmost  muscle  and  marrow 
of  goodness  itself,  goodness  with  teeth,  with  a  fist,  goodness 
that  smiled,  that  ha-ha'd,  and  that  leaped  and  danced  —  per- 
petual motion  of  goodness,  goodness  that  reeked  —  has  been 
reserved  for  Theodore  Roosevelt.  We  have  had  goodness 
that  was  bland  or  proper,  and  goodness  that  was  pious 
or  sentimental  and  sang,  "Nearer  My  God  to  Thee,"  or 
goodness  that  was  kind  and  mushy,  but  this  goodness  with  a 
glad  look  and  bounding  heart,  goodness  with  an  iron  hand,  we 
have  not  had  before.  It  is  Mr.  Roosevelt's  goodness  that  has 
made  him  interesting  in  Cairo,  Paris,  Rome,  and  Berlin.  He 
has  been  conducting  a  grand  tour  of  goodness.  He  has  been 
a  colossal  drummer  of  goodness,  conducting  an  advertising 
campaign.  He  has  proved  himself  a  master  salesman  for 
moral  values.  And  he  has  put  the  American  character, 
its  hope,  its  energy,  on  the  markets  and  on  the  credits  of  the 
world. 

With  all  his  faults,  those  big,  daring,  yawning  fissures  in  him, 
he  is  news  about  us,  faults  and  all.  Though  I  may  be,  as  I  cer- 
tainly am  much  of  the  time,  standing  and  looking  across  at 
him,  across  an  abyss  of  temperament  that  God  cut  down  be- 
tween us  thousands  of  years  ago,  and  while  he  may  have  a 
score  of  traits  I  would  not  like  and  others  that  no  one  would 
like  in  any  one  else,  there  he  is  storming  out  at  me  with  his 
goodness !  It  is  his  way  —  God  help  him ! —  God  be  praised  for 
him !  There  he  is ! 

I  know  an  American  when  I  see  one.  He  is  a  man  who  is 
singing. 

A  man  who  is  singing  is  a  man  who  is  so  shrewd  about  people 
that  he  sees  more  in  them  than  they  see  in  themselves  and  who 
does  things  so  shrewdly  in  behalf  of  God,  that  when  God  looks 
upon  him  he  delights  in  him.  Then  God  falls  to  of  course 
and  helps  him  do  them. 

When  American  men  saw  that  there  was  a  man  among  them 


482  CROWDS 

who  was  taking  a  thing  like  the  Presidency  of  the  United  States 
(that  most  people  never  run  risks  with)  and  putting  it  up  before 
everybody,  and  using  it  grimly  as  a  magnificent  bet  on  the 
people,  they  looked  up.  Millions  of  men  leaped  in  their  hearts 
and  as  they  saw  him  they  knew  that  they  were  like  him! 
So  did  Theodore  Roosevelt  become  news  about  Us. 


CHAPTER  X 
AMERICAN  TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT 

I  WOULD  like  to  say  more  specifically  what  I  mean  by  an 
American  or  singing  government. 

The  thing  that  counts  the  most  in  a  government  is  its  tem- 
perament, A  German  government  succeeds  by  having  the 
German  temperament.  An  American  government  must  have 
the  American  temperament. 

If  we  are  fortunate  enough  to  have  in  America  a  government 
with  an  American  temperament  what  would  it  be  like?  And 
how  would  it  differ  from  the  traditional  or  conventional  tem- 
perament, governments  are  usually  allowed  to  have? 

If  I  were  confined  to  one  or  two  words  I  would  put  it  like  this : 

If  a  government  has  the  conventional  temperament,  it 
says  "NO." 

If  it  has  the  American  Temperament  it  says,  "YES, 
BUT  ..." 

The  whole  policy  and  temper  of  a  true  American  government 
is  summed  up  in  its  saying  as  it  looks  about  it  —  now  to 
this  business  man  and  now  to  that,  just  in  time,  "YES 
BUT." 

Louis  Brandeis,  of  Boston,  when  he  was  made  attorney 
for  the  Gas  Company  of  Boston  to  defend  the  company  from 
the  criticisms  of  the  people,  sent  suddenly  scores  of  men  all 
about  canvassing  the  city  and  looking  up  people  to  find  fault 
with  the  gas. 

He  spent  thousands  of  dollars  a  month  of  the  Gas  Company's 
money  for  a  while  in  helping  people  to  be  disagreeable,  until 
they  had  it  attended  to  and  got  over  it. 

483 


484  CROWDS 

The  Gas  Company  had  the  canvassers  show  the  people  how 
they  could  burn  less  gas  for  what  they  got  for  it,  and  tried 
to  help  them  cut  their  bills  in  two.  Incidentally,  of  course, 
they  got  to  thinking  about  gas  and  about  what  they  got 
for  it,  and  about  other  ways  they  could  afford  to  use  it, 
and  began  to  have  the  gas  habit  —  used  it  for  cooking  and 
heating. 

The  people  found  they  wanted  to  use  four  times  as  much 
gas. 

The  Boston  Gas  Company  smiled  sweetly. 

Boston  smiled  sweetly. 

Not  many  months  had  passed  and  two  things  had  happened 
in  Boston. 

The  Boston  Gas  Company,  with  precisely  the  same  directors 
in  it,  had  made  over  the  directors  into  new  men,  and  all  the 
people  in  Boston  (all  who  used  gas)  apparently  had  been  made 
over  into  new  people. 

What  had  happened  was  Brandeis  —  a  man  with  an  American 
temperament. 

Mr.  Brandeis  had  defended  his  company  from  the  people  by 
going  the  people's  way  and  helping  them  imtil  they  helped 
him. 

Mr.  Brandeis  gave  gas  a  soul  in  Boston. 

Before  a  gas  corporation  has  a  soul,  it  would  be  American  for 
a  government  to  treat  it  in  one  way.  After  it  has  one  it  would 
be  American  to  treat  it  in  another.  There  are  two  complete 
sets  of  conduct,  principles,  and  visions  in  dealing  with  a  cor- 
poration before  and  after  its  having  a  soul. 

Preserving  the  females  of  the  species  and  killing  males  as  a 
method  of  discrimination  has  been  applied  to  all  animals  except 
human  beings.  This  is  suggestive  of  a  method  of  discrimination 
in  dealing  with  corporations.  A  corporation  that  has  a  soul 
and  that  is  the  most  likely  to  keep  reproducing  souls  in  others 
should  be  treated  in  one  way,  and  a  corporation  that  has  not 
should  be  treated  in  another. 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         485 

There  are  two  assumptions  underneath  everybody's  thought, 
underneath  every  action  of  our  government:  Which  is  the 
American  assumption? 

People  are  going  to  be  bad  if  they  can. 

People  are  going  to  be  good  if  they  can. 

Men  who  want  to  arrange  laws  and  adjust  life  on  the  as- 
sumption that  business  men  will  be  bad  if  they  can,  it 
seems  to  some  of  us,  are  inefficient  and  unscientific.  It 
seems  to  us  that  they  are  off  on  the  main  and  controlling 
facts  in  American  human  nature.  It  is  not  true  that  Amer- 
ican business  men  will  be  bad  if  they  can.  They  will  be  good 
if  they  can. 

This  is  my  assertion.     I  cannot  prove  it. 

What  we  seem  to  need  next  in  this  country  in  order  to  be 
clear-headed  and  to  go  ahead,  is  to  prove  it.  We  want  a  com- 
petent census  of  human  nature. 

Lacking  a  census  of  human  nature,  the  next  best  thing  we 
can  do  is  to  watch  the  men  who  seem  to  know  the  most  about 
human  nature. 

We  put  ourselves  in  their  hands. 

These  men  seem  to  believe,  judging  from  their  actions,  that 
there  is  reaUy  nothing  that  suits  our  temperament  better  in 
America  than  being  good.  If  we  can  manage  to  have  some 
way  of  being  good  that  we  have  thought  of  ourselves, 
we  like  it  still  better.  We  dote  on  goodness  when  it  is  ours 
and  when  we  are  allowed  to  put  some  punch  into  it.  We 
want  to  be  good,  to  express  our  practical,  our  doing-ideal- 
ism, but  we  will  not  be  driven  to  being  good  and  people  who 
think  they  can  drive  us  to  being  good  in  a  government  or  out 
of  it  are  incompetent  people.     They  do  not  know  who  we  are. 

We  say  they  shall  not  have  their  way  with  us. 

Let  them  get  us  right  first.  Then  they  can  do  other 
things. 

What  is  our  American  temperament? 

Here  are  a  few  American  reflections. 


486  CROWDS 

The  government  of  the  next  boys'  school  of  importance  in 
this  country  is  going  to  determine  the  cuts  and  free  hours,  and 
privileges  not  by  marks,  but  by  its  genius  for  seeing  through 
boys. 

And  instead  of  making  rules  for  two  hundred  pupils  because 
just  twenty  pupils  need  them,  they  will  make  the  rules  for 
just  twenty  pupils. 

Pupils  who  can  use  their  souls  and  can  do  better  by  telling 
themselves  what  to  do,  will  be  allowed  to  do  better.  Why 
should  two  hundred  boys  who  want  to  be  men  be  bullied  into 
being  babies  by  twenty  infants  who  can  scare  a  school  govern- 
ment into  rules,  i.  e.,  scare  their  teachers  into  being  small  and 
mean  and  second-rate? 

A  government  that  goes  on  this  principle  with  business  men, 
and  that  does  it  in  a  spirit  of  mutual  understanding  for  those 
who  are  not  yet  free  from  rules,  and  in  a  spirit  of  confidence  and 
expectation  and  of  talking  it  over,  will  be  a  government  with 
an  American  temperament. 

The  first  trait  of  a  great  government  is  going  to  be  that  it 
will  recognize  that  the  basis  of  a  true  government  in  a  democracy 
is  privilege  and  not  treating  all  people  alike.  It  is  going  to  see 
that  is  it  a  cowardly,  lazy,  brutal,  and  mechanical-minded  thing 
for  a  government  which  is  trying  to  serve  a  great  people  —  to 
treat  all  the  people  alike.  The  basis  of  a  great  government, 
like  the  basis  of  a  great  man  (or  even  the  basis  of  a  good  diges- 
tion) is  discrimination,  and  the  habit  of  acting  according 
to  facts.  We  will  have  rules  or  laws  for  people  who  need 
them,  and  men  in  the  same  business  who  amount  to  enough 
and  are  American  enough  to  be  safe  as  laws  to  themselves, 
will  continue  to  have  their  initiative  and  to  make  their  business 
a  profession,  a  mould,  an  art  form  into  which  they  pour  their 
lives.  The  pouring  of  the  lives  of  men  like  this  into  their 
business  is  the  one  thing  that  the  business  and  the  government 
want. 

Several  things  are  going  to  happen  when  what  a  good  govern- 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         487 

ment  seeks  each  for  a  man's  business,  is  to  let  him  express 
himself  in  it. 

When  a  man  has  proved  conclusively  that  he  has  a  higher 
level  of  motives,  and  a  higher  level  of  abilities  to  make  his 
motives  work,  the  government  is  going  to  give  him  a  higher  level 
of  rights,  liberties,  and  immunities.  The  government  will  give 
special  liberties  on  a  sliding  scale  and  with  shrewd  provision 
for  the  future.  The  government  will  not  give  special  liberties 
to  the  man  with  higher  motives  than  other  men  have,  who  has 
not  higher  abilities  to  make  his  motives  work,  nor  will  it  give 
special  liberties  to  the  man  who  has  higher  abilities  which  could 
make  higher  motives  work,  but  who  has  not  the  higher  motives. 

Men  who  are  new  kinds  and  new  sizes  of  men  and  who  have 
proved  that  they  can  make  new  kinds  and  new  sizes  of  bargains; 
that  they  can  make  (for  the  same  money)  new  kinds  and  new 
sizes  of  goods,  and  who  incidentally  make  new  kinds  and  new 
sizes  of  people  out  of  the  people  who  buy  the  goods,  men  who 
have  achieved  all  these  supposed  visionary  feats  by  their  own 
initiative,  will  be  allowed  by  the  government  to  have  all  the 
initiative  they  want,  and  immunities  from  fretful  rules  as  long  as 
they  resemble  themselves  and  keep  on  doing  what  they  have 
shown  they  can  do.  The  government  will  deal  with  each  man 
according'  to  the  facts,  the  scientific  facts,  that  he  has  proved 
about  himself. 

The  government  acts  according  to  scientific  facts  in  every- 
thing except  men,  in  pure  food,  in  cholera,  and  the  next  thing 
the  government  is  going  to  do  is  to  be  equally  efficient  in  dealing 
with  scientific  facts  in  men. 

It  is  going  to  give  some  men  inspected  liberty.  If  these  men 
say  they  can  be  more  efficient,  as  a  railroad  sometimes  is,  by 
being  a  monopoly,  by  being  a  vast,  self-visioned,  self-controlled 
body  the  government  will  have  enough  character,  expert 
courage  and  shrewdness  about  human  nature  to  provide  a  way 
for  them  to  try  it. 

When  the  other  people  come  up  andaskwhythey  cannot  have 


488  CROWDS 

these  special  immunities  and  why  they  cannot  be  a  monopoly, 
or  nearly  a  monopoly,  too,  the  government  will  tell  them  why. 

Telling  them  why  will  be  governing  them. 

When  we  once  reckon  with  new  kinds  and  new  sizes  of  men, 
everything  follows.  The  first  man  who  organizes  a  true  monop  - 
oly  for  public  service  and  who  does  it  better  than  any  state 
could  do  it,  because  he  thinks  of  it  himself,  glories  in  it  and 
has  a  genius  for  it,  will  be  given  a  peerage  in  England  perhaps. 
But  he  would  not  really  care.  The  thing  itself  would  be  a  peer- 
age enough  and  either  in  America  or  England  he  would  rather 
be  rewarded  by  being  singled  out  by  the  government  for  special 
rights  and  distinctions  in  conducting  his  business.  The  best 
way  a  democracy  can  honour  a  man  who  has  served  it  is  not  to 
give  him  a  title  or  to  make  a  frivolous,  idle  monument  of 
bronze  for  him,  but  to  let  him  have  his  own  way. 

The  way  to  honour  any  artist  or  any  creative  man,  any  man  a 
country  is  in  need  of  especially,  is  to  let  him  have  his  own  way. 


We  are  told  that  the  way  to  govern  trusts  is  to  untrammel 
competition. 

But  the  way  to  untrammel  competition  is  not  to  try  to  un- 
trammel it  in  its  details  with  lists  of  things  men  shall  not  do. 

This  is  cumbersome. 

We  would  probably  find  it  very  much  more  convenient 
in  specifying  979  detailed  things  trusts  cannot  do,  if  we  could 
think  of  certain  sum-totals  of  details. 

Then  we  could  deal  with  the  details  in  a  lump. 

The  best  sum  totals  of  details  in  this  world  that  have  ever 
been  invented  yet,  are  men. 

We  will  pick  out  a  man  who  has  a  definite,  marked  character, 
who  is  a  fine,  convenient  sum-total  that  any  one  can  see,  of 
things  not  to  do. 

We  will  pick  out  another  man  in  the  same  line  of  business  who 
is  a  fine,  convenient  sum-total  of  things  that  people  ought  to  do. 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         489 

The  government  will  find  ways,  as  the  Coach  of  Business  as 
the  Referee  of  the  Game  for  the  people,  to  stand  by  this  man 
until  he  whips  the  other,  drives  him  out  of  business  or  makes 
him  play  as  good  a  game  as  he  does. 


When  a  child  finds  suddenly  that  his  father  is  not  merely 
keeping  him  from  doing  things,  that  his  father  has  a  soul, 
the  father  begins  to  get  results  out  of  the  child. 

As  a  rule  a  child  discovers  first  that  his  father  has  a  soul  by 
noticing  that  he  insists  on  treating  him  as  if  he  had  one. 

Of  course  a  corporation  that  has  not  a  soul  yet  does  not  pro- 
pose to  be  dictated  to  by  a  government  that  has  not  a  soul 
yet.  When  corporations  without  souls  see  overwhelmingly 
that  a  government  has  a  soul,  they  will  be  filled  with  a 
wholesome  fear.  They  will  always  try  at  first  to  prevent  it 
from  having  a  soul  if  they  can. 

But  the  moment  it  gets  one  and  shows  it,  they  will  be  glad. 
They  will  feel  on  firm  ground.  They  wUl  know  what  they 
know.     They  will  act. 

In  the  hospital  on  the  hill  not  far  from  my  house,  one  often 
sees  one  attendant  going  out  to  walk  with  twelve  insane  men. 
One  would  think  it  would  not  be  safe  for  twelve  insane  men  to 
go  out  to  walk  with  one  sane  man,  with  one  man  who  has  his 
soul  on. 

The  reason  it  is  safe,  is,  that  the  moment  one  insane  man  or 
man  who  has  not  his  soul  on,  attacks  the  man  who  has  a  soul, 
all  of  the  other  eleven  men  throw  themselves  upon  him  and  fling 
him  to  the  ground.  Men  whose  souls  are  not  on,  protect, 
every  time,  the  man  who  has  his  soul  on  because  the  man  who  has 
a  soul  is  the  only  defence  they  have  from  the  men  who  have  not. 

It  is  going  to  be  the  same  with  governments.  We  believe 
in  a  government's  ha\nng  as  much  courage  in  America  as  a  ten- 
dollar-a-week  attendant  in  an  insane  asylum.  We  want  a 
government  that  sees  how  courage  works. 


490  CROWDS 

We  are  told  in  the  New  Testament  that  we  are  all  members 
one  of  another. 

If  society  has  a  soul  and  if  every  member  of  it  has  a 
soul,  what  is  the  relation  of  the  social  soul  to  the  individual 
soul? 

A  man's  soul  is  the  faculty  in  him  for  seeing  the  Whole  in 
relation  to  the  part  —  his  vision  for  others  in  relation  to  his 
vision  for  himself. 

My  forefinger's  soul  in  writing  with  this  fountain  pen  is  the 
sense  my  forefinger  has  of  its  relation  to  my  arm,  my  spinal 
column,  and  my  brain.  The  ability  and  efficiency  of  my  fore- 
finger depends  upon  its  soul,  that  is,  its  sense  of  relation  to  the 
other  members  of  the  body.  If  my  forefinger  tries  to  act  like 
a  brain  all  by  itself,  as  it  sometimes  does,  nobody  reads  my 
writing. 

The  government  in  a  society  is  the  soul  of  all  the  members 
and  it  treats  them  according  to  their  souls. 

The  one  compulsion  a  government  will  use  if  it  has  a  soul, 
will  be  granting  charters  in  business  in  such  a  way  as  to 
fix  definite  responsibility  and  definite  publicity  upon  a  few 
men. 

If  a  corporation  has  a  soul,  it  must  show.  It  must  have 
a  face.  Anybody  can  tell  a  face  off-hand  or  whUe  going 
by.  Anybody  can  keep  track  of  a  corporation  if  it  has  a 
face. 

The  trouble  with  the  average  corporation  is  that  aU  that  any- 
body can  see  is  its  stomach.     Even  this  is  anonymous. 

Whose  Stomach  is  it.''  Who  is  responsible  for  it?  If  we 
hit  it,  whom  will  we  hit?  Let  the  government  find  out.  If 
the  time  the  government  is  now  spending  in  making  impossibly 
minute  laws  for  impossibly  minute  men,  were  spent  in  finding 
out  what  size  men  were,  and  who  they  were  and  then  giving 
them  just  as  many  rights  from  tlie  people,  as  they  are  the  right 
kind  and  the  right  size  to  handle  for  the  people,  it  would  be 
an  American  government 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         491 

If  there  is  one  thing  rather  than  another  that  an  American 
or  an  EngUshman  loves,  it  is  asserting  himself  or  expressing 
his  character  in  what  he  does.  The  typical  dominating  English- 
man or  American  is  not  as  successful  as  a  Frenchman  or  as  an 
Italian  in  expressing  other  things,  as  he  is  in  expressing  his 
character. 

He  cares  more  about  expressing  his  character  and  asserting 
it.  If  he  is  dealing  with  things,  he  makes  them  take  the  stamp 
of  who  he  is.  If  he  is  dealing  wdth  people,  he  makes  them  see 
and  acknowledge  who  he  is.  They  must  take  in  the  facts  about 
what  he  is  like  when  they  are  with  him.  They  must  deal  with 
him  as  he  is. 

This  trait  may  have  its  disadvantages,  but  if  an  Englishman 
or  an  American  is  on  this  earth  for  anything,  this  is  what  he  is 
for  —  to  express  his  character  in  what  he  does  —  in  strong, 
vigorous,  manly  lines  draw  a  portrait  of  himself  and  show  what 
he  is  like  in  what  he  does.  This  may  be  called  on  both  sides 
of  the  sea  to-day  as  we  stand  front  to  front  with  the  more  grace- 
ful nations,  Anglo-Saxon  Art 

It  is  because  this  particular  art  in  the  present  crisis  of  human 
nature  on  this  planet  is  the  desperate,  the  almost  reckless  need 
of  a  world  that  the  other  nations  of  the  world  with  all  their 
dislike  of  us  and  their  superiorities  to  us,  with  all  our  ugliness 
and  heaviness  and  our  galumphing  in  the  arts,  have  been  com- 
pelled in  this  huge,  modem  thicket  of  machines  and  crowds  to 
give  us  the  lead. 

And  now  we  are  threading  a  way  for  nations  through  the 
moral  wilderness  of  the  earth. 

This  position  has  been  accorded  us  because  it  goes  with  our 
temperament,  because  we  can  be  depended  upon  to  insist  on 
asserting  ourselves  and  on  expressing  ourselves  in  what  we  do. 
If  the  present  impromptu  industrial  machinery  which  has  been 
handed  over  to  us  thoughtlessly  and  in  a  hurrj%  does  not  express 
us,  everybody  knows  that  we  can  be  depended  on  to  assert 
ourselves  and  that  we  will  insist  on  one  that  will.     The  nations 


492  CROWDS 

that  are  more  polite  and  that  can  dance  and  bow  more  nicely 
than  we  can  in  a  crisis  like  this  would  be  dangerous.  It  is 
known  about  us  throughout  a  world  that  we  are  not  going  to 
be  cowed  by  wood  or  by  iron  or  by  steel  and  that  we  are  not 
going  to  be  cowed  by  men  who  are  all  wood  and  iron  and  steel 
inside.  If  wood,  iron,  or  steel  does  not  express  us,  we  are 
Englishmen  and  we  are  Americans.  We  will  butt  our  character 
into  it  until  it  does. 


If  the  American  workman  were  to  insist  upon  butting  his 
American  temperament  into  his  labour  union  machinery,  what 
would  his  labour  machinery  in  America  soon  begin  to  show  that 
an  American  labourer  was  like.f* 

I  imagine  it  might  work  out  something  like  this: 

The  thoughtful  workman  looks  about  him.  He  discovers 
that  the  workman  pays  at  least  two  times  as  much  for  coal  as  he 
needs  to  because  miners  down  in  Pennsylvania  work  one  third 
as  hard  as  they  might  for  the  money. 

When  he  comes  to  think  of  it,  all  the  labouring  men  of 
America  are  paying  high  prices  because  they  have  to  pay  all 
the  other  workmen  in  America  for  working  as  little  as  they  can. 
He  is  working  one  third  less  than  he  can  and  making  his  own 
class  pay  for  it.  He  sees  every  workman  about  him  paying 
high  prices  because  every  other  workman  in  making  things  foi 
him  to  eat  and  for  him  to  wear,  is  cheating  him  —  doing  a  third 
less  a  day  for  him  than  he  ought. 

At  this  point  the  capitalists  pile  in  and  help.  They  shove 
the  prices  up  still  higher  because  capital  is  not  interested  in  an 
industry  in  which  the  workmen  do  six  hours'  work  in  nine. 
It  demands  extra  profits.  So  while  the  workmen  put  up  the 
prices  by  not  working,  the  capitalists  put  up  the  prices  because 
they  are  afraid  the  workmen  will  not  work.  Half  work,  high 
prices. 

Then  the  American  workman  thinks.     He  begins  to  suppose. 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         493 

Suppose  that  the  millers'  workmen  and  the  workmen  in  the 
woollen  mills  in  America  see  how  prices  of  supplies  for  labouring 
men  are  going  up  and  suppose  they  agree  to  work  as  hard  as 
they  can?  Suppose  the  wool  workers  of  the  world  want  cheap 
bread.  The  flour  mill  workers  want  cheap  clothes.  We 
will  say  to  the  bread  people,  "We  will  bring  down  the 
price  of  wool  for  you  if  you  will  bring  down  the  price  of  bread 
for  us." 

Then  let  Meat  and  Potatoes  do  the  same  for  one  another. 
Then  two  industries  at  a  time,  industries  getting  brains  in 
pairs,  until  like  the  animals  going  into  the  ark,  little  by  little 
(or  rather  very  fast,  almost  piling  in,  in  fact,  after  the  first  pair 
have  tried  it),  at  last  our  true,  spirited,  practical  minded 
American  workmen  will  have  made  their  labour  machines  as 
natural  and  as  human  and  as  American  as  they  are.  They 
will  stop  trying  to  lower  prices  by  not  working,  each  workman 
joining  (in  a  factory)  the  leisure  classes  and  making  the  other 
workmen  pay  for  it. 


The  American  workman,  as  things  are  organized  now,  finds 
himself  confronted  with  two  main  problems.  One  is  himself. 
How  can  he  get  himself  to  work  hard  enough  to  make  his  food 
and  clothes  cheap?     The  other  is  his  employer. 

What  will  the  American  workman  do  to  express  his  American 
temperament  through  his  labour  union  to  his  employer?  The 
American  workmen  will  go  to  their  employers  and  say:  "In- 
stead of  doing  six  hours'  work  in  nine  hours,  we  will  do  nine 
hours'  work  in  nine  hours. "  The  millers,  for  instance,  will  say 
to  the  flour  mill  owners :  "  We  will  do  a  third  more  work  for  you, 
make  you  a  third  more  profit  on  our  labour  if  you  will  divide 
your  third  more  profit  like  this: 

"First,  by  bringing  down  the  price  of  flour  to  everybody; 

"Second,  by  bringing  up  our  wages.  Third,  by  taking  more 
money  yourselves." 


494  CROWDS 

American  labouring  men  who  did  this  would  be  acting  like 
Americans.     It  is  the  American  temperament. 

They  will  insist  on  it:  The  labour  men  will  continue  to  say 
to  their  employers,  "We  will  divide  the  proceeds  of  our  extra 
work  into  three  sums  of  money  — ours,  yours,  and  everybody's." 
In  return  we  will  soon  find  the  employers  saying  the  same  thing 
to  the  labour  men.  Employers  would  like  to  arrange  to  be 
good.  If  they  can  get  men  who  earn  more,  they  want  to  pay 
them  more. 

The  labourers  would  like  to  be  good,  i.  e.,  work  more  for  em- 
ployers who  want  to  pay  them  more. 

But  being  good  has  to  be  arranged  for. 

Being  good  is  a  matter  of  mutual  understanding,  a  matter  of 
organization,  a  matter  of  butting  our  American  temperament 
into  our  industrial  machines. 

All  that  is  the  matter  with  these  industrial  machines  is  that 
they  are  not  like  us. 

Our  machines  are  acting  just  now  for  all  the  world  as  if  they 
were  the  Americans  and  as  if  we  were  the  machines. 

Are  we  for  the  machines,  or  are  the  machines  for  us.? 

All  that  the  American  labourers  and  that  the  American 
capitalists  have  to  do  is  to  show  what  they  are  really  like, 
organize  their  news  about  themselves  so  that  they  get  it  through 
to  one  another,  and  our  present  great  daily  occupation  in  Amer- 
ica (which  each  man  calls  his  "business")  all  the  workmen 
going  down  to  the  mills  and  all  the  employers  going  down  to 
their  offices,  and  then  for  six,  eight,  nine  hours  a  day  being 
chewed  on  by  machines,  will  cease. 

We  make  our  industrial  machines.  We  are  Americans. 
Our  machines  must  have  our  American  temperament. 

If  an  American  employer  were  to  insist  on  butting  his  Ameri- 
can temperament  into  his  industrial  machine,  what  would  his 
industrial  machine,  when  it  is  well  at  work  at  last,  show  an 
American  employer's  temperament  to  be  like? 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         495 

The  first  thing  that  would  show  in  his  machine,  I  think,  would 
be  its  courage,  its  acting  with  boldness  and  initiative,  origi- 
nality and  freedom,  without  being  cluttered  up  by  precedents- 
or  running  and  asking  Mama,  its  clear-headedness  in  what  it 
wants,  its  short-cut  in  getting  to  it,  and  above  all  a  kind  of 
ruthless  faith  in  human  nature,  in  the  American  people,  in  its 
goods  and  in  itself. 

The  typical  American  business  man  of  the  highest  class  — 
the  man  who  is  expressing  his  American  temperament  best  in 
his  business  —  is  the  one  who  is  expressing  in  it  the  most  cour- 
age for  himself  and  for  others  and  for  his  government.  He  has 
big  beliefs  every  few  minutes  a  day,  and  he  acts  on  them  with 
nonchalance. 

If  he  is  running  a  trust  —  our  most  characteristic,  recklessly 
diflBcult  American  invention  for  a  man  to  show  through,  and  if 
he  tries  to  get  his  American  temperament  to  show  through  in  it, 
tries  to  make  his  trust  like  a  vast  portrait,  like  a  kind  of 
countenance  on  a  country,  of  what  a  big  American  business  is 
like,  what  will  he  do? 

He  will  take  a  little  axiom  like  this  and  act  as  if  it  were  so, 

//  in  any  given  case  the  producers  by  collusion  and  combination 
can  be  efficient  in  lowering  icages  to  employees  and  raising  prices 
and  cheating  the  public,  this  same  combination  or  collusion  ivould 
be  efficient  in  raising  the  wages  of  employees,  loivering  prices  and 
serving  the  public. 

He  will  then,  being  an  American,  turn  to  his  government  and 
say  "I  am  a  certain  sort  of  man.  If  I  am  allowed  to  be  an 
exception  and  to  combine  in  this  matter,  I  can  prove  that  I  can 
raise  wages,  lower  prices  for  a  whole  nation  in  these  things  that 
I  make.  I  am  a  certain  sort  of  man.  Do  you  think  I  am,  or 
do  you  think  that  lam  not.?     I  want  to  know." 

The  government  looks  noncommittally  at  him.  It  says  it 
cannot  discriminate. 

He  says  nothing  for  a  time,  but  he  thinks  in  his  heart  that 
it  is  incompetent  and  cowardly  to  run  a  great  government  of  a 


496  CROWDS 

great  nation  as  a  vast  national  sweep  or  flourish  of  getting  out 
of  brains  and  of  evading  vision.  It  seems  to  him  lazy  and  eflfem- 
inate  in  a  government  to  treat  all  combinations  and  all  mono])- 
olies  alike.  He  says :  "  Look  me  in  the  eyes !  I  demand  of  you 
as  a  citizen  of  this  country  the  right  to  be  looked  by  my  govern- 
ment in  the  eyes.  What  sort  of  man  am  I?  Here  are  all  my 
doors  open.  My  safes  are  your  safes  and  my  books  are  your 
books.  Am  I  or  am  I  not  a  man  who  can  conduct  his  business 
as  a  great  profession,  one  of  the  dignities  and  energies  and 
joys  of  a  great  people? 

"What  am  I  like  inside.?  Is  what  I  am  like  inside  —  my 
having  a  small  size  or  a  big  size  of  motive,  my  having  a  right 
kind  or  a  wrong  kind  of  ability  of  no  consequence  to  this 
government.?  Does  the  government  of  this  country  really  mean 
that  the  most  important  things  a  country  like  this  can  produce, 
the  daily,  ruling  motives  of  the  men  who  are  living  in  it,  have 
no  weight  with  the  government.?  Am  I  to  understand  that  the 
government  does  not  propose  to  avail  itself  of  new  sizes  and  new 
kinds  of  men  and  new  sizes  and  new  kinds  of  abilities  in  men.? 
What  I  am  trying  to  do  in  my  product  is  to  lower  the  prices 
and  raise  the  wages  for  a  nation.  Will  you  let  me  do  it.? 
Will  you  watch  me  while  I  do  it.?" 

This  will  be  the  American  trust  of  to-morrow.  The  average 
trust  of  this  country  has  not  yet  found  itself,  but  the  moral  and 
spiritual  history,  the  religious  message  to  a  government  of  The 
Trust  That  Has  Found  Itself  will  be  something  like  this. 

Perhaps  when  we  have  a  trust  that  has  found  itself,  we  will 
have  a  government  that  has  dared  to  find  itself,  that  has  the 
courage  to  use  its  insight,  its  sense  of  difference  between  men, 
as  it  means  of  getting  what  it  wants  for  the  people. 

As  it  is  now,  the  government  has  not  found  itself  and  it  falls 
back  on  complex  rules  or  machines  for  getting  out  of  seeing 
through  people. 

Where  courage  is  required,  it  proceeds  as  it  proceeds  with 
g,utomobile  speeding  laws.     Everybody  knows  that  one  man 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         497 

driving  his  car  three  miles  an  hour  may  be  more  dangerous 
than  another  kind  of  man  who  is  driving  his  car  thirty. 

When  our  government  begins  to  be  a  government,  begins  to 
express  the  American  temperament,  it  will  be  a  government  that 
will  devote  its  energy,  its  men,  and  its  money  to  being  expert 
in  divining,  and  using  diflPerences  between  men.  It  will  govern 
as  any  father,  teacher,  or  competent  business  man  does  by 
treating  some  people  in  one  way  and  others  in  another,  by 
giving  graded  speed  licenses  in  business,to  labour  imions,  trusts, 
and  business  men. 

The  government  will  be  able  to  do  this  by  demanding,  acquir- 
ing, and  employing  as  the  servants  of  the  people,  men  who  are 
experts  in  human  nature,  masters  in  not  treating  men  alike  — 
Crowbars,  lemonade-straws,  chisels,  and  marshmallows,  power- 
houses and  iEolian  harps  by  the  people,  for  the  people,  and  of 
the  people,  will  be  rated  for  what  they  are  and  will  be  used  for 
what  they  are  for. 

This  will  be  democracy.  It  will  be  the  American  tempera- 
ment in  government. 


Is  President  Wilson  or  is  he  not  going  to  fall  back  into  a  mere 
lawyer  Moseslike  way  of  getting  people  to  be  good,  or  is  he 
going  to  be  a  man  like  David,  half  poet,  half  soldier,  who  got 
his  way  with  the  nation  half  by  appreciating  the  men  in  it  and 
being  a  fellow  human  being  with  them,  and  half  by  fighting 
them  when  they  would  not  let  him  be  a  fellow  human  being 
with  them,  and  would  not  let  him  appreciate  them  ? 

Almost  any  nation  or  government  can  get  some  kind  of 
Moses  to-day  but  the  men  that  America  is  producing  would  not 
particularly  notice  a  Moses  probably  now.  A  Moses  might  do 
for  a  Rockefeller,  but  he  could  not  really  do  anything  with  a 
man  like  Theodore  N.  Vail  who  has  the  telephones  and  tele- 
graphs of  a  country  talking  and  ticking  to  us  all,  all  night,  all 
day,  what  kind  of  a  man  he  is. 


498  CROWDS 

A  big  affirmative,  inspirational  man  like  David  or  even 
Napoleon  who  inspires  people  with  one  breath  and  fights  hard 
with  the  next,  a  man  who  swings  his  hat  for  the  world,  a  man 
who  goes  on  ahead  and  says  "Come!"  is  the  only  man  who  can 
be  practical  in  America  to-day  in  helping  real  live  American 
men  like  McAdoo,  like  Edison  and  Acheson, —  men  who  can 
express  a  people  in  a  business  —  to  express  them. 

The  people  have  spoken.  A  man  in  the  White  House  who 
cannot  say  "Come"  goes. 

We  want  a  poet  in  the  WTiite  House.  If  we  can  not  have 
a  poet  for  the  White  House  soon,  we  want  a  poet  who  will 
make  us  a  poet  for  the  WTiite  House, 

I  do  not  believe  it  is  too  much  to  expect  a  President  to  be  a 
poet.  We  have  had  a  poet  for  President  once  in  one  supreme 
crisis  of  this  nation  and  the  crisis  that  is  coming  now  is  so 
much  deeper,  so  much  more  human  and  world-wide  than 
Lincoln's  was  that  it  would  almost  seem  as  if  a  place  like  the 
W^hite  House  (where  one's  poetry  could  really  work)  would 
make  a  poet  out  of  anybody. 

A  President  who  has  not  a  kind  of  plain,  still,  homely  poetry 
in  him,  a  belief  about  people  that  sings,  in  the  present  appalling 
crisis  of  the  world  is  impracticable  or  visionary. 

So  we  do  not  say,  "Have  we  a  President  that  can  get  our 
Bells,  Edisons,  McAdoos,  Achesons  to  be  good  by  toeing  a  line.?  " 

We  say,  "Have  we  a  President  who  can  swing  into  step,  who 
can  join  in  the  singing,  who  can  catch  up?" 

Tunnel  McAdoo,  when  he  lifted  up  his  will  against  the  sea 
and  against  the  seers  of  Wall  Street,  was  singing.  W^hen  he 
conceived  those  steel  cars,  those  roaring  yellow  streaks  of  light 
ringing  through  rocks  beneath  the  river,  streets  of  people  flash- 
ing through  under  the  slime  and  imder  the  fish  and  under  the 
ships  and  under  the  wide  sunshine  on  the  water,  he  was  singing ! 
He  raised  millions  of  dollars  singing. 

Of  course  he  sang  the  way  Americans  usually  sing,  and  had 
to  do  as  well  as  he  could  in  talking  to  bankers  and  investors 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         499 

not  to  look  as  if  he  were  singing,  but  there  it  all  was  singing 
inside  him,  the  seven  years  of  digging,  the  seven  years  of  dull 
thundering  on  rocks  under  the  city,  and  at  last  the  happy  steel 
cars  all  green  and  gold,  the  streams  of  people  all  yellow  light 
hissing  and  pouring  through  —  those  vast  pipes  for  people 
beneath  the  sea! 

If  we  have  a  President,  let  him  sing  like  McAdoo,  or  like 
Luther  Burbank,  or  like  Theodore  N.  Vail,  or  like  Colonel 
Goethals,  picking  up  a  little  isthmus  like  Panama,  a  string 
between  two  continents,  playing  on  it  as  if  it  were  a  harp;  or 
like  Edward  Ripley  playing  with  the  Santa  Fe  Railroad  for  all 
the  world  like  Homer  with  a  lute,  all  his  seven  thousand  men, 
all  his  workmen,  all  their  wives  and  their  children,  all  the  cities 
along  the  line  striking  up  and  joining  in  the  chorus  or  Hke 
Carborundum  Acheson,  backed  up  by  his  little  Niagara  Falls 
oiling  the  wheels  of  a  world,  weaving  diamonds  into  steel,  hard- 
ening the  bones  of  the  earth  into  skyscrapers,  into  railroads, 
into  the  mighty  thighs  of  flying  locomotives.     .     .     . 

Any  man  who  is  seen  acting  in  this  world  with  a  thing,  as  if 
he  believed  in  the  thing,  as  if  he  believed  in  himself  and  believed 
in  other  people,  is  singing. 

Moses  striking  out  with  a  rod,  as  we  are  told,  a  path  along 
the  sea  for  his  people  may  have  done  a  more  showy  thing  from 
a  religious  point  of  view,  hitting  the  water  on  top  so,  making  a 
great  splash  with  an  empty  place  in  it  for  people  to  march 
through,  but  he  was  not  essentially  more  religious  than  McAdoo, 
with  all  those  modest  but  mighty  columns  of  figures  piling  up 
behind  him,  with  all  those  splendid,  dumb,  still  glowing 
engineers  behind  him,  lifting  up  his  will  against  cities,  lifting 
up  his  will  against  herds  of  politicians,  haughty  newspapers, 
against  the  flocks  of  silly  complacent  old  ferry-boats  waddling 
in  the  bay,  against  the  wind  and  the  rain  and  the  cold  on  the 
water,  and  all  the  banks  of  Wall  Street.    .   .    . 

When  we  want  to  tell  News  to  our  President  about  o*irselves 
in  America,  we  point  to  William  G.  McAdoo 


500  CROWDS 

The  first  news  that  we,  the  American  people,  must  contrive 
to  get  into  the  White  House  about  ourselves  is  that  we  do  not 
want  to  be  improved,Tand  that  we  do  not  like  an  improving  tone 
in  our  government.  We  want  to  be  expressed  the  way  McAdoos 
express  us.  We  want  a  government  that  expresses  our  faith 
in  one  another,  in  what  we  are  doing,  and  in  ourselves,  and  in 
the  world. 

We  are  singing  over  here  on  this  continent.  We  would  not 
all  of  us  put  it  in  just  this  way.  But  our  singing  is  the  main 
thing  we  can  do,  and  a  government  that  is  trying  to  improve 
us  feebly,  that  is  looking  askance  at  us  and  looking  askance  at  our 
money,  and  at  our  labour,  and  that  does  not  believe  in  us  and 
join  in  with  us  in  our  singing  does  not  know  what  we  are  like. 

Our  next  national  business  in  America  is  to  get  the  real  news 
over  to  the  President  of  what  we  are  like. 

It  is  news  that  we  want  in  the  White  House.  A  missionary 
in  the  White  House,  be  he  ever  so  humble,  will  not  do. 

Mr.  Roosevelt,  himself,  with  the  word  Duty  on  every  mile- 
post  as  he  whirled  past,  with  suggestions  of  things  for  other 
people  to  do  buzzing  like  bees  about  his  head,  acquired  his 
tremendous  and  incredible  power  with  us  as  a  people  because, 
in  spite  of  his  violent  way  of  breaking  out  into  a  missionary 
every  morning  and  every  evening  when  he  talked,  it  was  not 
his  talking  but  his  singing  that  made  him  powerful — his  sing- 
ing, or  doing  things  as  if  he  believed  in  people,  his  I  wills  and  I 
won'ts,  his  assuming  every  day,  his  acting  every  day,  as  if 
American  men  were  men.  He  sang  his  way  roughly,  hoarsely, 
even  a  little  comically  at  times  into  the  hearts  of  people,  stirred 
up  in  the  nation  a  mighty  heat,  put  a  great  crackling  fire  under 
it,  put  two  great  parties  into  the  pot,  boiled  them,  drew  off  all 
that  was  good  in  them,  and  at  last,  to-day,  as  I  write  (February 
1913),  the  prospect  of  a  good  square  meal  in  the  White  House 
(with  some  one  else  to  say  grace)  is  before  the  people. 

The  people  are  waiting  to  sit  down  once  more  in  the  White 
House  and  refresh  themselves. 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT        501 

At  least,  the  soup  course  is  on  the  table. 

Who  did  it,  please?  Who  bullied  the  cook  and  got  every- 
body ready? 

Theodore  Roosevelt,  singing  a  little  roughly,  possibly  hurrah- 
ing "/  will,  I  vyiU,  I  won't,  I  loorit,"  and  acting  as  if  he  be- 
lieved in  the  world. 

Bryan  in  the  village  of  Chicago  sitting  by  at  a  reporter's 
table  saw  him  doing  it. 

Bryan  saw  how  it  worked. 

Bryan  had  it  in  him  too. 

Bryan  heard  the  shouts  of  the  people  across  the  land  as  they 
gloried  in  the  fight.  He  saw  the  signals  from  the  nations  over 
the  sea. 

Then  Armageddon  moved  to  Baltimore. 


And  now  the  table  is  about  to  b«  spread. 
It  is  to  be  Mr.  Wilson's  soup. 

But  the  soup  will  have  a  Roosevelt  flavour  or  tang  to  it. 
And  we  will  wait  to  see  what  Mr.  Wilson  will  do  with  the 
other  courses. 


A  poet  in  words,  with  two  or  three  exceptions,  America  has 
not  produced. 

The  only  touch  of  poetry  or  art  as  yet  that  we  have  in 
America  is  —  acting  as  if  we  believed  in  people.  This  particu- 
lar art  is  ours.     Other  people  may  have  it,  but  it  is  all  we  have. 

This  is  what  makes  or  may  make  any  moment  the  common 
American  a  poet  or  artist. 

Speaking  in  this  sense,  Mr.  Roosevelt  is  the  first  poet  America 
has  produced  that  European  peoples  and  European  govern- 
ments have  noticed  for  forty  years,  or  had  any  reason  to  notice. 
We  respectfully  place  Mr.  Roosevelt  with  Mr.  McAdoo  (and  if 
Mr.  Brandeis  will  pardon  us,  with  Mr.  Brandeis)  as  a  typical 


502  GROWTHS 

American  before  the  eyes  of  the  new  President.  We  ask  him 
to  take  Mr.  Roosevelt  as  a  very  important  part  of  the  latest 
news  about  us. 

The  true  imaginative  men  of  our  modern  life,  the  poets  of 
crowds  and  cities  are  not  to-day  our  authors,  preachers,  pro- 
fessors or  lawyers  or  philosophers.  The  poets  of  crowds  are 
our  men  like  this,  our  vision-doers,  the  men  who  have  seen 
visions  aud  dreamed  dreams  in  the  real  and  daily  things,  the 
daring  Governors  like  Wilson  and  like  Hughes,  the  daring  in- 
ventors of  great  business  houses,  the  men  who  have  invented 
the  foundations  on  which  nations  can  stand,  on  which  rail- 
roads can  run,  the  men  whose  imaginations,  in  the  name  of 
heaven,  have  played  with  the  earth  mightily,  watered  deserts, 
sailed  cities  on  the  seas,  the  men  who  have  whistled  and  who 
have  said  "Gome!"  to  empires,  who  have  thought  hundred- 
year  thoughts,  taken  out  nine  hundred  and  ninety-nine  year 
leases,  who  have  thought  of  mighty  ways  for  cities  to  live,  for 
cities  to  be  cool,  to  be  light,  to  be  dark,  who  have  conceived 
ways  for  nations  to  talk,  who  have  grasped  the  earth  and  the 
sky  like  music,  like  words,  and  put  them  in  the  hands  of  the 
people,  and  made  the  people  say,  "O  earth,"  and  "O  sky,  thou 
art  great,  but  we  also  are  great!  Gome  earth  and  sky,  thou 
shalt  praise  God  with  us!" 

Who  are  these  men? 

Let  the  President  catch  up! 

Who  are  these  men  ?  Here  is  Edward  A.  Filene,  who  takes 
up  the  pride,  joy,  beauty,  self-respect,  and  righteousness  of  a 
city,  swings  it  into  a  Store,  and  makes  that  Store  sing  about  the 
city  up  and  down  the  world!  Here  is  Alexander  Gassatt,  im- 
perturbable, irrepressible,  and  like  a  great  Boy  playing  leapfrog 
with  a  Railroad  —  Gassatt  who  makes  quiet-hearted,  dreamy 
Philadelphia  duck  under  the  Sea,  bob  up  serenely  in  the 
middle  of  New  York  and  leap  across  Hell  Gate  to  get  to 
Boston!  Let  the  parliaments  droning  on  their  benches,  the 
Congresses  pile  out  of  their  doors  and  catch  up. 


TEMPERAMENT  AND  GOVERNMENT         503 

Let  the  lawyers  —  the  little  swarms  of  dark-minded  law- 
yers, wondering  and  running  to  and  fro,  creeping  in  offices, 
who  have  tried  to  run  our  world,  blurred  our  governments, 
and  buzzed,  who  have  filled  the  world  with  piles  of  old  paper. 
Congressional  Records,  with  technicalities,  words,  droning, 
weariness,  despair,  and  fear  .  .  .  let  them  come  out  and 
look!    Let  them  catch  up! 

Let  a  man  in  this  day  in  the  presence  of  men  like  these  sing. 
If  a  man  cannot  sing,  let  him  be  silent.  Only  men  who  are 
singing  things  shall  do  them. 

I  go  out  into  the  street,  I  go  out  and  look  almost  anywhere, 
listen  anywhere,  and  the  singing  rises  round  me ! 

It  was  singing  that  spread  the  wireless  telegraph  like  a  great 
web  across  the  sky. 

It  was  singing  that  dug  the  subways  under  the  streets  in 
New  York. 

It  was  singing,  a  kind  of  iron  gladness,  hope  and  faith  in 
men,  that  has  flung  up  our  skyscrapers  into  the  lower 
stories  of  the  clouds,  and  made  them  say,  "/  will!  IvyUl!  I  wUir* 
to  God. 

Ah,  how  often  have  I  seen  them  from  the  harbour,  those 
flocking,  crowded  skyscrapers  under  that  little  heaven  in  New 
York,  lifting  themselves  in  the  sunlight  and  in  the  starlight, 
lifting  themselves  before  me,  sometimes,  it  seems,  like  crowds 
of  great  states,  like  a  great  country  piled  up,  like  a  nation  reach- 
ing, like  the  plains  and  the  hills  and  the  cities  of  my  people 
standing  up  against  heaven  day  by  day  —  all  those  flocks  of 
the  skyscrapers  saying,  "/ ?i;i//.'  I  wiU!  I  wUlF'  to  God. 

The  skyscrapers  are  news  about  u§  to  our  President.  He 
shall  reckon  with  skyscraper  men.  He  shall  interpret  men  that 
belong  with  skyscrapers. 

And  as  he  does  so,  I  shall  watch  the  people  answer  him,  now 
with  a  glad  and  mighty  silence  and  now  with  a  great  solemn 
shout. 

The  skyscrapers  are  their  skyscrapers. 


504  CROWDS 

The  courage,  the  reaching-up,  the  steadfastness  that  is  in 
them  is  in  the  hearts  of  the  people. 

If  the  President  does  not  know  us  yet  in  America,  does  not 
know  McAdoo  as  a  representative  American,  we  will  thunder 
on  the  doors  of  the  White  House  until  he  does. 

My  impression  is  he  would  be  out  in  the  yard  by  the  gate 
asking  us  to  come  in. 

We  are  America.  We  are  expressing  our  joy  in  the  world, 
our  faith  in  God,  and  our  love  of  the  sun  and  the  wind  in  the 
hearts  of  our  people. 

In  America  the  free  air  breathes  about  us,  and  daily  the  great 
sun  climbs  our  hillsides,  swings  daily  past  our  work.  There 
are  ninety  million  men  with  this  sun  and  this  wind  woven  into 
.their  bodies,  into  their  souls.     They  stand  with  us. 

The  skyscrapers  stand  with  us. 

All  singing  stands  with  us. 

Ah,  I  have  waked  in  the  dawn  and  in  the  sun  and  the  wind 
have  I  seen  them ! 

That  sun  and  that  wind,  I  say  before  God,  are  America! 
They  are  the  American  temperament. 

I  will  have  laws  for  free  men,  laws  with  the  sun  and  the  wind 
in  them! 

I  have  waked  in  the  dawn  and  my  heart  has  been  glad  with 
the  iron  and  poetry  in  the  skyscrapers. 

I  will  have  laws  for  men  and  for  American  men,  laws  with 
iron  and  poetry  in  them! 

The  way  for  a  government  to  get  the  poetry  in  is  to  say  "Yes" 
to  somebody. 

The  way  for  a  government  to  get  the  iron  in  is  not  by  saying 
"No."  It  is  not  American  in  a  government  to  keep  saying 
"No."  The  best  way  for  our  government  in  America  to  say 
"No  "  to  a  man,  is  to  let  him  stand  by  and  watch  us  saying 
"Yes"  to  some  one  else. 

Then  he  will  ask  why. 

Then  he  will  stand  face  to  face  with  America. 


CHAPTER  XI 

NEWS-BOOKS 

The  most  practical  thing  that  could  happen  now  in  the 
economic  world  in  America  would  be  a  sudden,  a  great  national, 
contemporary  literature. 

America,  unlike  England,  has  no  recognized  cultured  class, 
and  has  no  aristocracy,  so  called,  with  which  to  keep  mere 
rich  men  suitably  miserable  —  at  least  a  little  humble  and 
wistful.  Our  greatest  need  for  a  long  time  has  been  some  big 
serene,  easy  way,  without  half  trying,  of  snubbing  rich  men  in 
America.  All  these  overgrown,  naughty  fellows  one  sees  every- 
where like  street  boys  on  the  corners  or  on  the  curbstones  of 
society,  calling  society  names  and  taking  liberties  with  it, 
tripping  people  up;  hoodlums  with  dollars,  all  these  micks  of 
money !  —  O,  that  society  had  some  big,  calm,  serene  way  like 
some  huge  hearty  London  policeman,  of  taking  hold  of  them 
—  taking  hold  of  them  by  the  seats  of  their  little  trousers  if 
need  be,  and  taking  them  home  to  Mother  —  some  way  of  set- 
ting them  down  hard  in  their  chairs  and  making  them  thought- 
ful! Nothing  but  a  national  literature  will  do  this.  "Life," 
(which  is,  with  one  exception,  perhaps,  the  only  religious 
weekly  we  have  left  in  America)  succeeds  a  little  and  has  some 
spiritual  value  because  it  succeeds  in  making  American  mil- 
lionaires look  funny,  and  in  making  them  want  to  get  away 
and  live  in  Europe.  But  "Life"  is  not  enough;  it  merely  hitches 
us  along  from  day  to  day  and  keeps  our  courage  up.  We  want 
in  America  a  literature,  we  want  the  thing  done  thoroughly 
and  forever  and  once  for  all.  We  want  an  Aristophanes,  a 
master  who  shall  go  gloriously  laughing  through  our  world, 

505 


506  CRO\^^)S 

through  our  chimneys  and  blind  machines,  pot-bellied  fortunes, 
empty  successes,  all  these  tiny,  queer  little  men  of  wind  and 
bladder,  until  we  have  a  nation  filled  with  a  divine  laughter, 
with  strong,  manful,  happy  visions  of  what  men  are  for. 

All  we  have  to  do  is  to  have  a  News-book  —  a  bookful  of  the 
kind  of  rich  men  we  want,  then  we  will  have  them.  We  will 
see  men  piling  over  each  other  all  day  to  be  them.  Men  have 
wanted  to  make  money  because  making  money  has  been  sup- 
posed to  mean  certain  things  about  a  man.  The  moment  it 
ceases  to  mean  them,  they  will  want  to  make  other  things. 

Where  is  the  news  about  what  we  really  want.f* 

,  when  I  took  him  to  the  train  yesterday,  spoke 

glowingly  of  the  way  the  Standard  Oil  Trust  had  reduced  oil 
from  twenty-nine  cents  to  eleven  cents. 

There  was  not  time  to  say  anything.  I  just  thought  a 
minute  of  how  they  did  it. 

Why  is  it  that  people  —  so  many  good  people  will  speak  of 
oil  at  eleven  cents  in  this  way,  as  if  it  were  a  kind  of  little 
kingdom  of  heaven? 

I  admit  that  eleven  cents  from  twenty-nine  cents  leaves 
eighteen  cents. 

I  do  not  deny  that  the  Standard  Oil  Trust  has  saved  me 
eighteen  cents.  But  what  have  they  taken  away  out  of  my 
life  and  taken  out  of  my  sense  of  the  world  and  of  the  way 
things  go  in  it  and  out  of  my  faith  in  human  nature  to  toss  me 
eighteen  cents  .^^ 

If  I  could  have  for  myself  and  others  the  sense  of  the  world 
that  I  had  before,  would  I  not  to-day,  day  after  day,  over  and 
over,  gallon  by  gallon,  be  handing  them  their  eighteen  cents 
back? 

What  difference  does  it  make  to  us  if  we  are  in  a  world  where 
we  can  buy  oil  for  eleven  cents  a  gallon  instead  of  twenty-nine, 
if  we  do  not  care  whether  we  are  alive  or  dead  in  it  and  do  not 
expect  anything  from  ourselves  or  expect  anything  of  anybody 
else?     I  submit  it  to  your  own  common  sense,  Gentle  Reader. 


NEWS-BOOKS  507 

Is  it  any  comfort  to  buy  oil  to  light  a  room  in  which  you  do  not 
want  to  sit,  in  which  you  would  rather  not  see  anything,  in 
which  you  would  rather  not  remember  who  you  are,  what  you 
do,  and  what  your  business  is  like,  and  what  you  are  afraid 
your  business  is  going  to  be  like? 

I  have  passed  through  all  this  during  the  last  fifteen  years 
and  I  have  come  out  on  the  other  side.  But  millions  of  lives 
of  other  men  are  passing  through  it  now,  passing  through  it 
daily,  bitterly,  as  they  go  to  their  work  and  as  they  fall  asleep 
at  night. 

The  next  thing  in  this  world  is  not  reducing  the  price  of  oil. 
It  is  raising  the  price  of  men  and  putting  a  market- value  on  life. 

WTiat  makes  a  man  a  man  is  that  he  knows  himself,  knows 
who  he  is,  what  he  is  for  and  what  he  wants.  Knowing  who 
he  is  and  knowing  what  he  is  about,  he  naturally  acts  like 
a  man,  knows  what  he  is  about  like  a  man,  and  gets  things 
done. 

A  nation  that  does  not  know  itself  shall  not  be  itself. 

A  nation  that  has  a  muddleheaded  literature,  a  nation  that 
to  say  nothing  of  not  being  able  to  express  what  it  has,  has  not 
even  made  a  beginning  at  expressing  what  it  wants;  a  nation 
that  has  not  a  great,  eager,  glowing  literature,  a  sublime  clear- 
headedness about  what  it  is  for  —  a  nation  that  cannot  put 
itself  into  a  great  book,  a  nation  that  cannot  weave  itself  to- 
gether even  in  words  into  a  book  that  can  be  unfurled  before 
the  people  like  a  flag  where  everybody  can  see  it  and  everybody 
can  share  it,  look  up  to  it,  live  for  it,  sleep  for  it,  get  up  in  the 
morning  and  work  for  it — work  for  the  vision  of  what  it  wants 
to  be  —  carmot  be  a  great  nation. 

A  masterpiece  is  a  book  that  has  a  thousand  years  in  it.  No 
man  has  a  right  to  say  where  these  thousand  years  in  it  shall 
lie,  whether  in  the  past  or  in  the  future.  It  is  the  thousand 
years'  worth  in  it  that  makes  a  masterpiece  a  masterpiece.  In 
America  we  may  not  have  the  literature  of  what  we  are  or  of 
what  we  have  been,  but  the  literature  of  what  we  are  bound  to 


508  CROWDS 

be,  the  literature  of  what  we  will,  we  will  have,  and  we  will 
have  to  have  it  before  we  can  begin  being  it. 

First  the  Specifications,  then  the  House. 

From  the  practical  or  literary  point  of  view  the  one  sign  we 
have  given  in  this  country  so  far,  that  the  stuff  of  masterpieces 
is  in  us  and  that  we  are  capable  of  a  great  literature,  is  that 
America  is  bored  by  its  own  books. 

We  let  a  French  parson  write  a  book  for  us  on  the  simple  life. 
We  let  a  poor  suppressed  Russian  with  one  foot  in  hell  reach 
over  and  write  books  for  us  about  liberty  which  we  greedily 
read  and  daily  use.  We  let  a  sublimely  obstinate  Norwegian, 
breaking  away  with  his  life,  pulling  himself  up  out  of  the  beauti- 
ful, gloomy,  morose  bog  of  romance  he  was  born  in  —  express 
our  American  outbreak  for  facts,  for  frank  realism  in  human 
nature. 

America  is  bored  by  its  own  books  because  every  day  it 
is  demanding  gloriously  from  its  authors  a  literature  —  books 
that  answer  our  real  questions,  the  questions  the  people  are 
asking  every  night  as  they  go  to  sleep  and  every  morning  when 
they  crowd  out  into  the  streets  —  Where  are  we  going  .5^  Who 
are  we?     What  are  we  like?     What  are  we  for? 


the  little  stoopy  cobbler  on street  in 


,  bought  some  machines  to  help  him  last  year  before  I 

went  away  and  added  two  or  three  slaves  to  do  the  work.  I 
find  on  coming  back  that  he  has  moved  and  has  two  show  win- 
dows now,  one  with  the  cobbling  slaves  in  it  cobbling,  and  the 
other  (a  kind  of  sudden,  impromptu  room  with  a  show  window 
in  it)  seems  to  be  straining  to  be  a  shoe  store.  When  you  go 
in  and  show  C in  his  shirt  sleeves,  —  your  old  shoes  hope- 
fully, he  slips  over  from  his  shining  leather  bench  to  the  shoe- 
store  side  and  shows  you  at  the  psychological  moment  a  new 
pair  of  shoes. 

He  is  in  the  train  now  with  me  this  morning,  across  the  aisle. 


NEWS-BOOKS  509 

looking  out  of  the  window  for  dear  life,  poor  fellow,  for  all  the 
world  as  if  he  could  suck  up  dollars  and  customers  —  and 
people  who  need  shoes  —  out  of  the  fields  as  he  goes  by,  the  way 
the  sun  does  mists,  by  looking  hard  at  them. 

I  watched  him  walking  up  and  down  the  station  platform 
before  I  got  on,  with  that  bent,  concentrated,  meek,  ready-to- 
die-getting-on  look.  I  saw  his  future  while  I  looked.  I  saw, 
or  thought  I  saw,  windows  full  of  bright  black  shoes,  I  saw  the 
cobbler's  shop  moved  out  into  the  ell  at  the  back,  and  two 

great  show  windows  in  front.     A C looks  like  an  edged 

tool. 

Millions  of  Americans  are  like  A C ,  like  chisels, 

adzes,  saws,  scoops.  You  talk  with  them,  and  if  you  talk 
about  anything  except  scooping  and  adzing,  you  are  not  talk- 
ing with  just  a  man,  but  a  man  who  is  for  something  and  who 
is  not  for  anything  else.  He  is  not  for  being  talked  with  cer- 
tainly, and  alas!  not  for  being  loved.  At  best  he  is  a  mere 
feminine  convenience  —  a  father  or  a  cash  secreter;  until  he 
wears  out  at  last,  buzzes  softly  into  a  grave. 

An  Englishman  of  this  type  is  a  little  better,  would  be 
more  like  one  of  these  screw-driver,  cork-screw  arrangements 
—  a  big  hollow  handle  with  all  sorts  of  tools  inside. 

Is  this  man  a  typical  American.''     Does  he  need  to  be? 

What  I  want  is  news  about  us. 

All  an  American  like  C needs  is  news.     His  eagerness  is 

the  making  of  him.  He  is  merely  eager  for  what  he  will  not 
want. 

All  he  needs  is  the  world's  news  about  people,  about  new 
inventions  in  human  beings,  news  about  the  different  and 
happier  kinds  of  newly  invented  men,  news  about  how  they 
were  thought  of,  and  how  they  are  made,  and  news  about  how 
they  work. 

I  demand  three  things  for  A C : 

I  want  a  novel  that  he  will  read  which  will  make  him  see 
himself  as  I  see  him. 


510  CROWDS 

I  want  a  moving  picture  of  him  that  he  will  go  to  and  like 
and  go  to  again  and  again. 

I  want  a  play  that  will  send  him  home  from  the  theatre  and 
keep  him  awake  with  what  he  might  be  all  that  night. 

I  want  a  news-book  for  A C ,  a  news-book  for  all  of  us. 

I  read  a  book  some  years  ago  that  seemed  a  true  news-book 
and  which  was  the  first  suggestion  I  had  ever  received  that  a 
book  can  be  an  act  of  colossal  statesmanship,  the  making  or 
remaking  of  a  people  —  a  masterpiece  of  modern  literature, 
laying  the  ground  plan  for  the  greatness  of  a  nation. 

When  I  had  read  it,  I  wanted  to  rush  outdoors  and  go  down 
the  street  stopping  people  I  met  and  telling  them  about  it. 
Once  in  a  very  great  while  one  does  come  on  a  book  like  this. 
One  wants  to  write  letters  to  the  reviews.  One  does  not  know 
what  one  would  not  do  to  go  down  the  long  aimless  Midway 
Plaisance  of  the  modern  books,  to  call  attention  to  it.  One 
wishes  there  were  a  great  bell  up  over  the  world.  .  .  .  One 
would  reach  up  to  it,  and  would  say  to  all  the  men  and  the 
women  and  to  the  flocks  of  the  smoking  cities,  "Where  are  you 
all?"  The  bell  would  boom  out,  "What  are  you  doing.?  Why 
are  you  not  reading  this  book.f*"  One  wonders  if  one  could 
not  get  a  coloured  page  in  the  middle  of  the  Atlantic  or  the  North 
American  Review  or  Everybody's  and  at  least  make  a  great  book 
as  prominent  as  a  great  soap  —  almost  make  it  loom  up  in  a 
country  like  a  Felt  Mattress  or  a  Toothbrush. 

The  book  that  has  made  me  feel  like  this  the  most  is  Charles 
Ferguson's  "Religion  of  Democracy."  I  have  always  won- 
dered why  only  people  here  and  there  responded  to  it.  The 
things  it  made  me  vaguely  see,  all  those  huge  masses  of  rerJ 
things,  gigantic,  half-godlike,  looming  like  towers  or  mountains 
in  a  mist.  .  .  .  Well,  it  must  have  been  a  little  hke  this 
that  Columbus  felt  that  first  morning! 

But  as  Columbus  went  on,  what  he  struck  after  all  was  real 
land,  some  piece  of  real  land  in  particnlar.    The  mist  of  vision 


NEWS-BOOKS  511 

did  precipitate  into  something  one  could  walk  on,  and  I  found 
as  I  went  on  with  Mr,  Ferguson's  book  that  if  there  was  going 
to  be  any  real  land,  somebody  would  have  to  make  some. 

But  for  the  time  being  Charles  Ferguson's  book  —  all  those 
glorious  generalizings  in  behalf  of  being  individual,  all  those 
beautiful,  intoned,  chanted  abstractions  in  behalf  of  being 
concrete  —  came  to  me  in  my  speechless,  happy  gratitude  as  a 
kind  of  first  sign  in  the  heavens,  as  a  pillar  of  cloud  by  day  and 
of  fire  by  night,  up  over  the  place  in  the  waste  of  water  where 
land.  Land !     At  last !     Land  again !  will  have  to  be. 

If  we  ever  have  a  literature  in  America,  it  will  be  found 
somewhere  when  the  mist  rolls  away,  right  under  Charles  Fer- 
guson's book. 

It  may  be  too  soon  just  now  in  this  time  of  transition  in  our 
land  of  piles  and  of  derricks  against  the  sky,  for  the  book.  All 
we  are  competent  for  now  is  to  say  that  we  want  such  a  book, 
that  we  see  what  it  will  do  for  us. 

When  we  want  it,  we  will  get  it.  Let  the  American  people 
put  in  their  order  now. 

In  the  meantime  the  Files  and  the  Derricks. 

All  these  young  and  mighty  derricks  against  the  sky,  all  these 
soaring  steel  girders  with  the  blue  through  them  —  America ! 

Ah,  my  God!  is  it  not  a  hoping  nation?  Three  thousand 
miles  of  Hope,  from  Eastport,  Maine,  to  San  Francisco  —  does 
not  the  very  sun  itself  racing  across  it  take  three  hours  to  get 
one  look  at  our  Hope? 

Here  it  is !  —  Our  World. 

Let  me,  for  one,  say  what  I  want. 

It  is  already  as  if  I  had  seen  it  —  one  big,  heroic  imagination 
at  work  at  last  like  a  sea  upon  our  world,  poetry  grappling 
with  the  great  cities,  with  their  labour,  with  their  creative 
might,  full  of  their  vast  joys  and  sorrows,  full  of  their  tussle 
with  the  sea  and  with  the  powers  of  the  air  and  with  the  iron 
in  the  earth !  —  the  big,  speechless  cities  that  no  one  has  spoken 
for  yet,  so  splendid,  and  so  eager,  and  so  silent  about  their  souls  J 


512  CROWDS 

It  is  true  we  are  crude  and  young. 

Behold  the  Derricks  like  mighty  Youths! 

In  our  glorious  adolescence  so  sublime,  so  ugly,  so  believing, 
will  no  one  sing  a  hymn  to  the  Derricks? 

Where  are  the  dear  little  Poets?     Where  are  they  hiding? 

Playing  Indian  perhaps,  or  making  Parthenons  out  of  blocks. 

Perhaps  they  might  begin  faintly  and  modestly  at  first. 

Some  dear,  hopeful,  modest  American  poet  might  creep  up 
from  under  them,  out  from  under  the  great  believing,  dumb 
Derricks  standing  on  tiptoe  of  faith  against  the  sky,  and  write 
a  book  and  call  it  "Beliefs  American  Poets  Would  Like  to 
Believe  if  They  Could." 


CHAPTER  Xn 
NEWS-BOOKS  n 

A  NATION'S  religion  is  its  shrewdness  about  its  ideals,  its 
genius  for  stating  its  ideals  or  news  about  itself,  in  the  terms  of 
its  everyday  life. 

A  nation's  literature  is  its  power  of  so  stating  its  ideals  that 
we  will  not  need  to  be  shrewd  for  them  —  its  power  of  ex- 
pressing its  ideals  in  words,  of  tracing  out  ideals  on  white 
paper,  so  that  ideals  shall  enthrall  the  people,  so  that  ideals 
shall  be  contagious,  shall  breathe  and  be  breathed  into  us,  so 
that  ideals  shall  be  caught  up  in  the  voices  of  men  and  sung  in 
the  streets. 

Ideals,  intangible,  electric,  implacable  irresistible,  all-enfold- 
ing ideals,  shall  hold  and  grip  a  continent  the  way  a  climate 
grips  a  continent,  like  sunshine  around  a  helpless  thing,  in  the 
hollow  of  its  hand,  and  possess  the  hearts  of  the  people. 

What  our  government  needs  now  is  a  National  band  in 
Washington. 

America  is  a  Tune. 

America  is  not  a  formula.  America  is  not  statistics,  even 
graphic  statistics.  A  great  nation  cannot  be  made,  cannot  be 
discovered,  and  then  be  laid  coldly  together  like  a  census. 
America  is  a  Tune.     It  must  be  sung  together. 

The  next  thing  statesmen  are  going  to  learn  in  this  country 
is  that  from  a  practical  point  of  view  in  making  a  great  nation 
only  our  Time  in  America  and  only  our  singing  our  Tune  can  save 
us.  A  great  nation  can  be  made  out  of  the  truth  about  us. 
The  truth  may  be  —  must  be  probably,  —  plain.  But  the  truth 
must  sing. 

51S 


514  .       CROWDS 

It  will  not  be  the  government  that  first  gets  the  truth  that 
will  govern  us.  The  government  that  gets  the  truth  big  enough 
to  sing  first,  and  sings  it,  will  be  the  government  that  will 
govern  us.  The  political  party  in  this  country  that  will  first 
be  practical  with  the  people,  and  that  will  first  get  what  it 
wants,  will  be  the  political  party  that  first  takes  Literature 
seriously.  Our  first  great  practical  government  is  going  to 
see  how  a  great  book,  searching  the  heart  of  a  nation,  expressing 
and  singing  the  men  in  it,  governs  a  people.  Being  a  Presi- 
dent in  a  day  like  this,  if  it  does  not  consist  in  being  a  poet, 
consists  in  being  the  kind  of  President  who  can  be,  at  least,  in 
partnership  with  a  poet. 

It  is  not  every  President  who  can  be  his  own  David,  who 
can  rule  with  one  hand  and  write  psalms  and  chants  for  his 
people  with  the  other. 

The  call  is  out,  the  people  have  put  in  their  order  to  the 
authors  of  America,  to  the  boys  in  the  colleges,  and  to  the 
young  women  in  the  great  schools  —  Our  President  wants  a 
book. 

Before  much  time  has  passed,  he  is  going  to  have  one. 

Being  a  President  in  this  country  has  never  been  expressed 
in  a  book. 

The  President  is  going  to  have  a  book  that  expresses  him  to 
the  people  and  that  says  what  he  is  trying  to  do.  He  will  live 
confidentially  with  the  book.  It  shall  be  in  his  times  of  trial 
and  loneliness  like  a  great  people  coming  to  him  softly.  He 
shall  feel  with  such  a  book,  be  it  day  or  night,  the  nation  by 
him,  by  his  desk,  by  his  bedside,  by  his  silence,  by  his  ques- 
tioning, standing  by,  and  lifting. 

In  the  book  the  people  shall  sing  to  the  President.  He  shall 
be  kept  reminded  that  we  are  there.  He  shall  feel  daily  what 
America  is  like.  America  shall  be  focussed  into  melody.  We 
shall  have  a  Hterature  once  more  and  the  singers,  as  in  Greece, 
as  in  all  happy  lands  and  in  all  great  ages,  shall  go  singing 
through  the  streets. 


NEWS-BOOKS  n  515 

There  is  no  singing  for  a  President  now.  All  a  President  can 
do  when  he  is  inaugurated,  when  he  begins  now,  is  to  kiss 
helplessly  some  singing  four  thousand  years  old  in  a  Bible  by 
another  nation. 

When  David  sang  to  his  people,  he  sang  the  news,  the  latest 
news,  the  news  of  what  was  happening  to  people  about  him 
from  week  to  week. 

Why  is  no  one  singing  1913,  our  own  American  1913? 

Why  is  no  one  stuttering  out  our  Bible — one  the  President 
couH  have  to  refer  to,  our  own  Bible  in  our  own  tongue  from 
morning  to  morning  in  the  symbols  that  breathe  to  us  out  of 
the  sounds  in  the  street,  out  of  the  air,  out  of  the  fresh,  bright 
American  sky,  and  out  of  the  new  ground  beneath  our  feet? 


It  is  easy  for  a  President  to  pile  up  three  columns  a  morning 
of  news  about  himself  to  us,  show  each  man  his  face  in  the 
morning,  but  what  is  there  he  can  do  with  twenty  thousand 
newspapers  at  his  breakfast  table,  to  pick  out  the  real  news 
about  us?     Who  shall  paint  the  portrait  of  a  people? 

One  could  go  about  in  the  White  House  and  study  the  por- 
traits of  the  presidents,  but  where  is  the  portrait  of  the  people? 
The  portrait  of  the  people  comes  in  little  bits  to  the  president 
like  a  puzzle  picture.  Each  man  brings  in  his  little  crooked 
piece,  jig-sawed  out  from  Iowa,  South  Dakota,  Oklahoma  or 
Aroostook  County,  Maine.  This  picture  or  vision  of  a  nation, 
this  wilderness  of  pieces,  can  be  seen  every  day  when  one  goes 
in,  lying  in  heaps  on  the  floor  of  the  White  House. 

A  literature  is  the  expression  on  the  face  of  a  nation.  A 
literature  is  the  eyes  of  a  great  people  looking  at  one. 

It  seems  to  be  as  we  look,  looking  out  of  the  past  and  faraway 
into  the  future. 

A  newspaper  can  set  a  nation's  focus  for  a  morning,  adjusting 
it  one  way  or  the  other.  A  President  can  set  the  focus  for  four 
years.    But  only  a  book  can  set  the  focus  for  a  nation's  next 


516  CROWDS 

hundred  years  so  that  it  can  act  intelligently  and  steadfastly 
on  its  main  line  from  week  to  week  and  morning  to  morning. 
Only  a  ])ook  can  make  a  vast,  inspiring,  steadfast,  stage-setting 
for  a  nation.  Only  a  book,  strong,  slow,  reflective,  alone  with 
each  man,  and  before  all  men,  can  set  in  vast  still  array  the 
perspective,  the  vision  of  the  people,  can  give  that  magnificent 
self-consciousness  which  alone  makes  a  great  nation,  or  a  mighty 
man.  At  last  humble,  imperious,  exalted,  it  shall  see  Itself, 
its  vision  of  its  daily  life  lying  out  before  it,  threading  its  way 
to  God! 


CHAPTER  Xin 
NEWS-PAPERS 

I  WENT  one  day  six  months  ago  to  the  Mansion  House 
and  heard  Lord  Grey,  and  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  and  Mr.  T.  C. 
Taylor  and  others  address  the  annual  meeting  of  the  Labour 
Copartnership  Association. 

I  found  myself  in  the  presence  of  a  body  of  men  who  believe 
that  Englishmen  are  capable  of  bigger  and  better  things  than 
many  men  believe  they  are  capable  of.  They  refuse  to  evade 
the  issue  of  the  coal  strike  and  to  agree  with  the  socialists  who 
have  given  up  believing  that  English  employers  can  be  com- 
petent and  who  merely  believe  that  we  will  have  to  rely  on 
our  governments  now  to  be  employers,  and  they  refuse  to 
agree  with  the  syndicalists,  who  believe  in  human  nature  still 
less  and  have  given  up  on  employers  and  on  governments  both. 

I  have  retained  three  impressions  as  a  result  of  the  meeting. 

The  first  was  that  it  was  the  most  significant  and  impressive 
event  since  the  coal  strike,  that  it  brought  the  whole  industrial 
issue  to  a  point  and  summed  the  coal  strike  up. 

The  second  impression  was  one  of  surprise  that  the  hall  was 
not  full. 

The  third  impression  came  the  next  day  when  I  looked 
through  the  papers  for  accounts  of  what  had  been  said  and  of 
what  it  stood  for. 

It  was  noted  pleasantly  and  hurriedly  as  one  of  the  day's 
events.  It  was  just  one  more  of  those  shadowy  things  that 
flicker  on  the  big  foolish,  drifting,  rolling  attention  of  a  world 
a  second  and  are  gone. 

People  were  given  a  few  inches. 

517 


518  CROWDS 

I  read  in  the  papers  that  same  day  a  quite  long  account  of 
a  discussion  of  nine  bishops  for  five  hours  (meeting  at  the  same 
time)  on  a  matter  of  proper  clothes  for  clergymen. 

I  would  have  said  of  that  meeting  of  the  Labour  Copartner- 
ship Association  —  that  it  was  a  meeting  of  a  Society  for 
Defence  and  Protection  of  Longer  Possible  Religion  on  the 
Earth  —  but  the  clergy  out  of  all  the  invitations,  did  not  seem 
very  largely  to  have  had  time  to  be  there. 

I  wondered  too  a  little  about  the  papers,  as  I  hunted  through 
them. 

It  set  one  to  thinking  if  anything  serious  to  the  nation  would 
have  happened,  if  possibly  during  the  coal  strike  the  I-,ondon 
papers  had  devoted  as  much  attention  to  T.  C.  Taylor  —  a 
mutual  interest  employer  —  and  to  how  he  runs  his  business 
—  as  to  Horatio  Bottomley? 

Possibly  too  what  Mr.  Sandow  prefers  to  have  people  drink 
is  not  so  important  —  perhaps  whole  pages  of  it  at  a  time  —  as 
Amos  Mann  and  how  he  runs  his  shoe  business  without  strikes, 
or  as  Joseph  Bibby  and  how  he  makes  oil  cakes  and  loyal  work- 
men together. 

I  read  the  other  day  of  a  clergyman  in  New  Jersey  —  who 
was  organizing  a  league  of  all  the  left-handed  men  in  the  world. 
Everything  is  being  organized,  whether  or  no.  Some  one  has 
financed  him.  There  will  be  some  one  very  soon  now  who 
will  pay  the  bUl  for  organizing  the  attention  of  a  world  and 
for  deciding  the  fate  of  human  nature.  It  would  be  worth 
while  spending  possibly  one  fortune  on  getting  human  nature 
to  settle  decisively  and  once  for  all  whether  it  has  any  reason 
to  believe  in  itself  or  not.  Why  have  a  world  at  all  —  one 
like  this?  Do  we  want  it?  Who  wants  it?  What  do  we  want 
instead?  W^e  will  advertise  and  find  out.  We  will  spend 
millions  of  pounds  and  Dreadnoughts,  even  national  beer- 
bills  on  it,  if  necessary,  on  making  everybody  know  that  men- 
tally competent  business  men  —  mutual-interest  employers,  and 
mentally  competent  workmen  —  mutual-interest  workmen,  can 


NEWS-PAPERS  519 

be  produced  by  the  human  race.  When  everybody  knows  that 
this  is  true,  nine  out  of  ten  Parliamentary  questions  would  be 
settled,  the  Churches  Would  again  have  a  chance  to  be  noticed, 
and  education  and  even  religion  could  be  taken  seriously. 
There  would  be  some  object  in  being  a  teacher  perhaps  once 
more  and  in  making  teaching  again  a  great  profession.  There 
would  be  some  object  perhaps  in  even  being  an  artist.  The 
world  would  start  off  on  a  decent,  self-respecting  theory  or 
vision  about  itself.  Things  could  begin  to  be  done  in  society 
once  more,  soundly,  permanently,  humanly  and  from  the 
bottom  up. 

We  would  go  out  on  the  streets  again  —  rich  and  poor  — 
and  look  in  each  other's  faces.  We  would  take  up  our  morning 
papers  without  a  sinking  at  the  heart. 

And  the  men  who  have  stopped  believing  in  men  and  who 
merely  believe  in  machines  would  be  indicted  before  the  bar 
of  mankind.  We  would  see  them  slowly  filing  back,  one  by  one, 
to  where  they  belong  —  on  the  back  seats  of  the  world. 

The  newspapers  in  England  and  America  seem  to  think 
that  in  their  business  of  rolling  the  world  along,  what  they 
find  themselves  confronted  with  just  now  is  an  economic  prob- 
lem. 

The  problem  that  the  newspapers  are  really  confronted  with, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  is  one  with  which  newspaper  men  big  and 
little  are  more  competent  to  deal  than  they  would  be  with  an 
expert  problem  in  economics.  The  real  problem  that  news- 
papers are  confronted  with  every  night,  every  morning,  to-day, 
is  a  problem  in  human  nature. 

Some  people  believe  that  human  nature  can  be  believed  in, 
and  others  do  not.  The  socialists,  the  syndicalists,  the  trades 
unionists,  as  a  class,  and  the  capitalists  as  a  class,  are  acting  as 
if  they  did  not.  A  great  many  inventors,  and  a  great  many 
workmen,  all  the  more  bold  and  inventive  workmen,  and  many 
capitalists  and  great  organizers  of  facts  and  of  men,  are  acting 
as  if  they  believed  in  human  nature. 


520  CROWDS 

Which  are  right?  Can  a  mutual-interest  employer,  can  a 
mutual-interest  worker,  be  produced  by  the  human  race? 
There  are  some  of  us  who  answer  that  this  is  a  matter  of  fact, 
that  this  type  of  man  can  be  produced,  is  already  produced, 
and  is  about  to  be  reproduced  indefinitely. 

The  moment  we  can  convince  trades  unions  and  convince 
employers  that  this  is  true  we  will  change  the  face  of  the  earth. 

Why  not  change  the  face  of  the  earth  now? 

In  this  connection  I  respectfully  submit  three  considerations : 

1st.  If  all  employers  of  the  world  to-morrow  morning  knew 
what  Lord  Grey  (as  President  of  the  Labour  Copartnership 
Association)  knows  to-day  about  copartnership  —  the  hard 
facts  about  the  way  copartnership  works  in  calling  out  human 
nature  —  in  nerving  and  organizing  labour,  every  employer 
in  the  world  to-morrow  would  begin  to  take  an  attitude 
toward  labour  which  would  result  in  making  strikes 
and  lockouts  as  impracticable,  as  incredible,  as  moony, 
as  visionary  forever  as  ideals  of  a  world  without  strikes 
look  now. 

2nd.  If  all  the  workmen  of  the  world  to-morrow  morning 
knew  what  Frederick  Taylor  (the  American  engineer)  knows 
about  planning  workmen's  work  so  that  they  receive,  for  the 
same  expenditure  of  strength,  a  third  more  wages  every  day, 
the  whole  attitude  of  labour  in  every  nation  and  of  the  trades 
unions  of  the  world  —  the  attitude  of  doing  as  little  work  as 
possible,  of  labouring  and  studying  and  slaving  away  to  dis- 
cover ways  of  not  being  of  any  use  to  employers  —  would  face 
about  in  a  day. 

3rd.  What  Lord  Grey  knows  about  copartnership  and  the 
way  it  works  is  in  the  form  of  ascertainable,  communicable,  and 
demonstrable  facts.  What  Frederick  Taylor  knows  and  what 
he  has  been  doing  with  human  beings  and  with  steel  and  pig 
iron  and  with  bricks  and  other  real  things  is  in  the  form  of 
history  that  has  been  making  for  thirty  years  —  and  that  can 
be  looked  up  and  proved. 


NEWS-PAPERS  521 

Why  should  not  everybody  who  employs  labour  know  what 
Lord  Grey  knows? 

And  why  should  not  all  workmen  know  what  a  few  thousand 
workmen  who  have  been  trained  under  Frederick  Taylor  to 
work  under  better  conditions  and  with  more  wages,  know? 

If  I  were  an  inspired  millionaire  the  first  thing  I  would  do 
to-morrow  would  be  to  supply  the  funds  and  find  the  men  who 
should  take  up  what  Lord  Grey  knows  about  employers,  and 
what  Frederick  Taylor  knows  about  workmen,  and  put  it  where 
all  who  live  shall  see  it  and  know  it.  I  would  spend  my  fortune 
in  proving  to  the  world,  in  making  everybody  know  and  believe 
that  the  mutual-interest  business  man  and  the  mutual-interest 
workman  have  been  produced  and  can  be  produced  and  shall 
be  produced  by  the  human  race. 

The  problem  of  the  fate  of  the  world  in  its  essential  nature 
and  in  its  spiritual  elements  and  gifts  —  has  come  to  be  in  this 
age  of  the  press  a  huge  advertising  problem  —  a  great  adventure 
in  human  attention. 

The  most  characteristic  and  human  and  natural  way,  and  the 
only  profound  and  permanent  way  to  handle  the  quarrel 
between  Capital  and  Labour  is  by  placing  certain  facts  — 
certain  rights-of-all-men-to-know,  into  the  hands  of  some  dis- 
interested and  powerful  statesman  of  publicity  —  some  great 
organizer  of  the  attention  of  a  world.  He  would  have  to  be  a 
practical  passionate  psychologist,  a  man  gifted  with  a  bird's- 
eye  view  of  publics  —  a  discoverer  of  geniuses  and  crowds, 
a  natural  diviner  or  reader  of  the  hearts  of  men.  He  shall 
search  out  and  employ  twenty  men  to  write  as  many  books 
addressed  to  as  many  classes  and  types  of  employers  and 
workers.  He  shall  arrange  pamphlets  for  every  dooryard  that 
cannot  help  being  read. 

He  shall  reach  trades  unions  by  using  the  cinema,  by  having 
some  master  of  human  appeal  take  the  fate  of  labour,  study  it 
out  in  pictures  —  and  the  truth  shall  be  thrown  night  after 
night  and  day  after  day  on  a  hundred  thousand  screens  around 


522  CROWDS 

a  world.  He  shall  organize  and  employ  wide  publicity  or  rely 
on  secret  and  careful  means  on  different  aspects  of  the  issue 
according  to  the  nature  of  the  issue,  human  nature  and  com- 
mon sense,  and  organize  his  campaign  to  reach  every  type  of 
person,  every  temperament,  and  order  of  circumstance,  each  in 
its  own  way. 

What  Lord  Grey  knows  and  what  Frederick  Taylor's  workmen 
know  shall  be  put  where  all  who  live  shall  see  it  —  where  every 
employer,  every  workman,  every  workman's  wife  and  every 
growing  boy  and  girl  that  is  passing  by,  as  on  some  vast  bill- 
board above  the  world,  shall  see  it  —  shall  see  and  know  and 
believe  that  employers  that  are  worth  believing  in  —  and 
that  workmen  who  can  work  and  who  are  skilled  and  clever 
enough  to  love  to  work  —  can  still  be  produced  by  the  human 
race. 

If  I  were  a  newspaper  man  I  would  start  what  might  be 
called  Pull  Together  Clubs  in  every  community,  men  in  all 
walks  of  life,  little  groups  of  crowdmen  or  men  in  the  com- 
munity who  could  not  bear  not  to  see  a  town  do  team  work. 

I  would  use  these  Pull  Together  Clubs  in  every  community 
as  means  of  gathering  and  distributing  news  —  as  local  com- 
mittees on  the  national  campaign  of  touching  the  imagination 
of  labour  and  touching  the  imagination  of  capital. 
'"Without  Vision  the  People  perish." 

I  would  begin  with  spending  five  million  dollars  on  a  vision 
for  the  people. 

What  would  I  do  with  a  five-milhon-dollar  fund  for  touch- 
ing the  imagination  of  labour  and  touching  the  imagination  of 
capital.'^ 

First:  preliminary  announcement  in  all  papers  and  in  all 
public  ways,  asking  names  and  addresses  of  workmen  who  have 
already  proved  and  established  their  belief  in  copartnership. 

Names  and  addresses  of  employers  in  the  same  way. 

Second :  names  and  addresses  of  workmen  who  would  believe 
in  it  if  +hey  could;  who  believe  in  the  principle  theoretically  and 


NEWS-PAPERS  523 

would  be  interested  in  seeing  how  it  could  be  practically  and 
technically  proved. 

Names  and  addresses  of  employers  m  the  same  way.    • 

Third:  selection  of  one  firm  in  each  industry,  the  best  and 
most  strategically  placed  to  carry  it  out  in  that  industry,  and 
placing  the  facts  before  them. 

Selection  of  the  leading  workmen  out  of  all  the  workmen  in 
the  nation  employed  in  that  industry,  who  would  be  willing  to 
work  with  such  a  firm. 

Fourth:  a  selection  of  travelling  secretaries  to  visit  trades 
unions  and  get  provisional  permission  and  toleration  for  these 
workmen  so  that  they  can  take  copartnership  places  under  such 
a  firm  with  the  consent  of  their  fellows  and  be  set  one  side  for 
experimental  purposes,,  under  the  protection  of  the  trades 
union  rules. 

Fifth:  I  would  find  the  most  promising  trades-union  branch 
in  each  industry  and  I  would  try  to  get  this  branch  to  take  it  up 
with  the  other  branches  until  all  trades  unions  were  brought 
to  admit  copartnership  members  on  special  terms. 

Sixth:  after  getting  copartnership  tolerated  for  certain  work- 
men employed  in  certain  firms  I  would  try  to  make  copartner- 
ship a  trades-union  movement. 

I  would  then  let  the  trades  unions  educate  the  employers. 

Seventh:  I  would  prepare  a  list  of  apparent  exceptions  to 
copartnership  as  a  working  principle.  I  would  investigate  and 
try  to  see  why  they  were  exceptions  and  why  copartnership 
would  not  work,  and  I  would  find  and  set  inventors  at  work, 
and  find  in  what  way  the  spirit  that  is  back  of  copartnership 
could  be  applied. 


CHAPTER   XIV 
NEWS  MACHINES 

WE  WANT  to  be  good  and  the  one  thing  we  need  to  do  is  to 
tell  each  other.  Then  we  will  be  good.  Our  conveniences  for 
being  good  in  crowds  are  not  finished  yet. 

We  have  invented  machines  for  crowds  to  see  one  another 
with  and  to  use  in  getting  about  in  the  dark.  One  engine? 
whirls  round  and  round  all  night  so  that  half  a  million  people 
can  be  going  about  anywhere  after  sunset  without  running 
into  each  other. 

Crowds  have  vast  machines  for  being  somewhere  else  —  run 
in  somewhat  the  same  way  all  from  one  unpretentious  building 
they  put  up  called  a  Power  House. 

A  great  many  of  our  machines  for  allowing  crowds  of  people 
to  move  their  bodies  around  with  have  been  attended  to,  but 
our  Intelligence- Machine,  our  machine  for  knowing  what  other 
people  really  think,  and  what  they  are  like  in  their  hearts  so  that 
we  can  know  enough  to  be  good  to  them,  and  have  brains  enough 
to  get  them  to  be  good  to  us,  is  not  finished  and  set  up  yet. 

The  industrial  problem  instead  of  being  primarily  an  eco- 
nomic problem  is  a  news  problem. 

If  a  President  were  to  appoint  a  Secretary  of  Labour  and 
were  to  give  him  as  one  of  his  conveniences,  a  news  engineer  — 
an  expert  at  attracting  and  holding  the  attention  of  labour 
unions  and  driving  through  news  to  them  about  themselves 
that  they  do  not  know  yet,  who  would  be  practically  at  the 
head  of  the  department  in  two  years.'*  The  Secretary  or  the 
Secretary's  news  engineer?  News  is  all  there  is  to  such  a 
department,  finding  out  what  it  is  and  distributing  it.     Any 

5U 


NEWS-MACHINES  525 

one  can  think  of  scores  of  labour-union  fallacies,  news  they  do 
not  know  about  themselves  that  they  will  want  to  know  at 
once  when  their  attention  is  called  to  it. 

If  nine  members  of  the  President's  Cabinet  were  national 
news  agents,  experts  in  nationalizing  news,  one  member  could 
do  with  his  subordinates  all  the  other  things  that  Cabinet 
members  do. 

The  real  problem  before  each  Cabinet  member  is  a  problem 
of  news.  If  the  Secretary  of  Commerce,  for  instance,  could  get 
people  to  know  certain  things,  he  would  not  need  to  do  at  all 
most  of  the  things  that  he  is  doing  now.  Neither  would  the 
Attorney  General. 

If  everything  in  a  Cabinet  position  turns  on  getting  people 
to  know  things,  why  not  get  them  to  know  them?  Why  not 
take  that  job  instead.''  Why  not  take  the  job  of  throwing  one's 
self  out  of  a  job?  Every  powerful  man  has  done  it  —  thrown 
himself  out  of  what  he  was  doing,  by  making  up  something 
bigger  to  do  from  the  beginning  of  the  world. 

In  every  business  it  is  the  man  who  can  recognize,  focus, 
organize,  and  apply  news,  and  who  can  get  news  through  to 
people,  who  soon  becomes  the  head  of  the  business. 

The  man  who  can  get  news  through  to  directors  and  to 
employees  and  make  them  see  themselves  and  see  one 
another  and  the  facts  as  they  are,  soon  gets  to  be  Head  of  the 
factory. 

The  man  who  can  get  news  through  to  the  public,  the  sales- 
man of  news  to  people  about  what  they  want  to  buy  and  about 
how  they  are  to  spend  their  money  —  very  personal,  intimate 
news  to  every  man  —  soon  rises  to  be  Head  of  the  Head  of  the 
factory  and  of  the  entire  business. 

It  will  probably  be  the  same  in  a  cabinet  or  in  a  government. 
If  the  Secretary  of  the  Department  of  Commerce  has  a  news 
engineer  as  a  subordinate  in  his  department  and  begins  to  study 
and  observe  how  to  do  his  work  best,  how  to  solve  his  problem 
in  the  nation,  we  will  soon  see  the  head  of  the  department,  if  he 


526  CROWDS 

really  is  the  head  of  the  department,  quietly  taking  over  his 
news  engineer's  job  and  letting  his  news  engineer  have  his. 

It  is  a  news  engineering  job,  being  a  Secretary  of  Commerce. 

Every  member  of  the  Cabinet  has  a  news  engineering  job. 

And  the  fact  seems  to  be  that  the  moment  the  news  is  attended 
to  in  each  member's  department  —  applied  news,  special  and 
private  news,  turned  on  and  set  to  work  where  it  is  called  for  — 
most  members  of  cabinets,  secretaries  of  making  people  do 
things,  and  for  that  matter,  the  Presidents  of  making  people 
do  things  will  be  thrown  out  of  employment.  The  Secretaries 
of  What  People  Think,  and  the  President  of  What  People 
Think — the  engineers  of  the  news  in  this  nation  —  will  be 
the  men  who  govern  it. 


CHAPTER  XV 
NEWS  -  CROWDS 

I  HAVE  tried  to  express  in  the  last  chapter,  some  kind  of 
tentative  working  vision  or  hope  of  what  authors  and  of  what 
newspaper  men  can  do  in  governing  a  country. 

This  chapter  is  for  anybody,  any  plain  human  being. 

Governments  all  over  the  world  to-day  are  groping  to  find 
out  what  plain  human  beings  are  like. 

It  does  not  matter  very  long  what  other  things  a  government 
gets  wrong,  if  it  gets  the  people  right. 

This  suggests  something  that  each  of  us  can  do. 

I  was  calling  on ,  Treasurer  of ,  in  his  new  bank, 

not  long  ago  —  a  hushed,  reverent  place  with  a  dome  up  over 
it  and  no  windows  on  this  wicked  world  —  a  kind  of  heavenly 
minded  way  of  being  lighted  from  above.  It  seemed  to  be  a 
kind  of  Church  for  Money. 

"This  is  new,"  I  said,  "since  I've  been  away.  Who  built 
it.?" 

mentioned  the  name  of  Non-Gregarious  as  if  I  had 

never  heard  of  him. 

I  said  nothing.  And  he  began  to  tell  me  how  Non  built  the 
bank.  He  said  he  had  wanted  Non  from  the  first,  but  that  the 
directors  had  been  set  against  it. 

And  the  more  he  told  the  directors  about  Non,  he  said,  the 
more  set  they  were.  They  kept  offering  a  good  many  rather 
vague  objections,  and  for  a  long  time  he  could  not  really  make 
them  out. 

Finally  he  got  it.     All  the  objections  boiled  down  to  one. 

527 


528  CROWDS 

Non  was  too  good  to  be  true.     If  there  was  a  man  like  Non  in 
this  world,  they  said,  they  would  have  heard  about  it  before. 


When  I  was  telling  ex-Mayor ,  in ,  about  Non, 

the  first  time,  he  interrupted  me  and  asked  me  if  I  would  mind 
his  ringing  for  his  stenographer.  He  was  a  trustee  and  respon- 
sible, either  directly  or  indirectly,  for  hundreds  of  buildings,  and 
he  wanted  the  news  in  writing. 

Of  course  there  must  be  something  the  matter  with  it,  he  said, 
but  he  wanted  it  to  be  true,  if  it  could,  and  as  the  bare  chance  of 
its  being  true  would  be  very  important  to  him,  he  was  going  to 
have  it  looked  up. 

Now  ex-Mayor is  precisely  the  kind  of  man  (as  half 

the  world  knows)  who,  if  he  had  been  a  contractor,  instead  of 
what  he  had  happened  to  be,  would  have  been  precisely  the  kind 
of  contractor  Non  is.  He  has  the  same  difficult,  heroic  blend 
of  shrewd  faiths  in  him,  of  high  motives  and  getting  what  he 
wants. 

But  the  moment  ex-Mayor found  these  same  motives 

put  up  to  be  believed  in  at  one  remove,  and  in  somebody  else, 
he  thought  they  were  too  good  to  be  true. 

I  have  found  myself  constantly  confronted  in  the  last  few 
years  of  observation  with  a  very  singular  and  interesting  fact 
about  business  men. 

Nine  business  men  out  of  ten  I  know,  who  have  high  motives, 
(in  a  rather  bluff  simple  way,  without  particularly  thinking 
about  it,  one  way  or  the  other)  seem  to  feel  a  little  superior  to 
other  people.  They  begin,  as  a  rule,  apparently,  by  feeling 
a  little  superior  to  themselves,  by  trying  to  keep  from  seeing  how 
high  their  motives  are,  and  when,  in  the  stern  scuffle  of  life, 
they  are  unable  any  longer  to  keep  from  suspecting  how  high 
their  motives  are  themselves,  they  fall  back  on  trying  to  keep 
other  people  from  suspecting  it. 

In 's  factory  in  ,  the  workers  in  brass,  a  few 


NEWS-CROWDS  529 

years  ago,  could  not  be  kept  alive  more  than  two  years  because 

they  breathed  brass  filings.     When installed,  at  great 

expense,  suction  machines  to  place  beside  the  men  to  keep 
them  from  breathing  brass,  some  one  said,  "Well  surely  you  will 
admit  this  time,  that  this  is  philanthropy?" 

"Not  at  all." 

The  saving  in  brass  air  alone,  gathered  up  from  in  front 
of  the  men's  mouths,  paid  for  the  machines.  What  is  more 
he  said  that  after  he  had  gone  to  the  expense  of  educating 
some  fine  workmen,  if  a  mere  little  sucking  machine  like 
that  could  make  the  best  workmen  he  had,  work  for  him 
twenty  years  instead  of  two  years,  it  was  poor  economy  to 
let  them  die. 

Nearly  all  of  the  really  creative  business  men  make  it  a  point, 
until  they  get  a  bit  intimate  with  people,  to  talk  in  this  tone 
about  business.  One  can  talk  with  them  for  hours,  for  days  at 
a  time,  about  their  business  —  some  of  them,  without  being 
able  a  single  time  to  corner  them  into  being  decent  or  into 
admitting  that  they  care  about  anybody. 

Now  I  will  not  yield  an  inch  to or  to  anybody  else  in 

my  desire  to  displace  and  crowd  out  altruism  in  our  modern  life. 
I  believe  that  altruism  is  a  feeble  and  discouraged  thing  from  a 
religious  point  of  view.  I  have  believed  that  the  big,  difficult 
and  glorious  thing  in  rehgion  is  mutuaUsm,  a  spiritual  genius 
for  finding  identities,  for  putting  people's  interests  together 
—  you-and-I-ness,  and  we-ness,  letting  people  crowd  in  and 
help  themselves. 

And  why  not  believe  this  and  drop  it.'  Why  should  nearly 
every  business  man  one  meets  to-day,  try  to  keep  up  this  des- 
perate show,  of  avoiding  the  appearance  of  good,  of  not  wanting 
to  seem  mixed  up  in  any  way  with  goodness  —  either  his  own 
or  other  people's? 

In  the  present  desperate  crisis  of  the  world,  when  all  our 
governments  everywhere  are  groping  to  find  out  what  business: 
men  are  really  like  and  what  they  propose  to  be  like,  if  a  man  i . 


530  CROWDS 

good  (far  more  than  if  he  is  bad)  everybody  has  a  right  to  know 
it.  The  President  has  a  right  to  know  it.  The  party  leaders 
have  a  right  to  know  it. 

It  is  a  big  businessUke  thing  for  a  man  to  make  goodness 
pay,  but  what  is  the  man's  real,  deep,  happy,  creative,  achiev- 
ing motive  in  making  goodness  pay.-*  What  is  it  in  the  man  that 
fills  him  with  this  fierce  desire,  this  almost  business-fanaticism 
for  making  goodness  pay? 

It  is  a  big  daily  grim  love  of  human  nature  in  him,  his  love  of 
being  in  a  human  world,  his  passion  for  human  economy,  for 
world  effciency  and  world-self-respect.  This  is  what  it  is  in 
him  that  makes  him  force  goodness  to  pay. 

The  business  men  of  the  bigger  type  who  let  themselves 
talk  in  this  tone  to-day,  do  not  mean  it,  they  are  letting  them- 
selves be  insensibly  drawn  into  the  tone  of  the  men  around 
them. 

We  have  gone  skulking  about  with  our  virtues  so  long,  saying 
that  we  have  none,  that  we  have  beUeved  it.  We  all  know 
men  finer  than  we  are  who  say  they  have  none.  So  we  have 
not,  probably. 

And  so  it  goes  on.  I  grow  more  and  more  tired  every  year 
of  going  about  the  business  world,  at  boards  of  trade  and  at 
clubs  and  at  dinners,  and  finding  all  this  otherwise  plain  and 
manly  world,  all  dotted  over  everywhere  with  aU  these  simple, 
good,  self-deceived  blundering  prigs  of  evil,  putting  on  airs 
before  everybody  day  and  night,  of  being  worse  than  they 
are! 

It  is  not  exactly  a  he.  It  is  a  Huindrum.  People  do  not 
deliberately  lie  about  human  nature.  They  merely  say  pianola- 
minded  things. 

One  goes  down  any  business  street,  Oxford  Street,  Bond 
Street,  or  Broadway.  One  hears  the  same  great  ragtime  tune 
of  business,  dinging  like  a  kind  of  street  piano,  through  men's 
minds,  "Sh-sh-sh-sh-!  Oh,  SH-SH!  Oh,  do  not  let  anybody 
know  I'm  being  good!" 


NEWS-CROWDS  531 

II 

I  am  not  going  to  try  any  longer  to  worm  out  of  my  virtues 
or  to  keep  up  an  appearance  of  having  as  low  motives  as  other 
people  are  trying  to  make  me  believe  they  have. 

They  have  lied  long  enough. 

I  have  lied  long  enough. 

My  motives  are  really  rather  high  and  I  am  going  to  admit  it. 

And  the  higher  they  are  (when  I  have  hustled  about  and  got 
the  necessary  brains  to  go  with  them)  the  better  they  have 
worked. 

Nine  times  out  of  ten  when  they  have  not  worked,  it  has 
been  my  fault. 

Sometimes  it  is  John  Doe's  fault. 

I  am  going  to  speak  to  John  Doe  about  it.  I  am  going  to  tell 
him  what  I  am  driving  at.  I  have  turned  over  a  new  leaf.  In 
the  crisis  of  a  great  nation  and  as  an  act  of  last  desperate 
patriotism,  I  am  going  to  give  up  looking  modest. 

For  a  long  time  now  I  have  wanted  to  dare  to  come  out  and 
stand  up  before  this  Modesty  Bug-a-boo  and  have  it  out  with 
it  and  say  what  I  think  of  it,  as  one  of  the  great,  still,  sinister 
threats  against  our  having  or  getting  a  real  national  life  in 
America. 

I  knew  a  boy  once  who  grew  so  fast  that  his  mother  always 
kept  him  wearing  shoes  three  sizes  too  large,  and  big,  hopeful- 
looking  coats  and  trousers.  Except  for  a  few  moments  a  year 
he  never  caught  up.  Nobody  ever  saw  that  boy  and  his  long 
shoes  when  he  was  not  butting  bravely  about,  stubbing  his 
toes  on  the  world  and  turning  up  his  sleeves. 

It  was  a  great  rehef  to  him  and  everybody,  finally,  when  he 
grew  up. 

I  am  going  to  let  myself  go  around,  for  a  while  now,  at  least 
untU  our  present  national  crisis  is  over  in  business  and  in 
politics,  Hke  that  boy. 

There  are  miUions  of  other  men  in  this  country  who  want 


532  CROWDS 

to  be  like  that  boy.  Nations  may  smile  at  us  if  they  want  to. 
We  will  smile  too  —  rather  stiffly  and  soberly,  but  for  better  or 
worse  we  propose  from  to-day  on,  to  let  people  see  what  we  are 
trying  to  be  daily,  grimly,  right  along  side  of  what  we  are ! 

I  have  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  only  way,  for  me,  at 
least,  to  keep  modest  and  kind,  is  to  have  my  ideals  all  on. 
When  one  is  going  around  in  sight  of  everybody  with  one's  moral 
sleeves  rolled  up,  and  one's  great  wistful,  broad  trousers  that 
do  not  look  as  if  they  would  ever  get  filled  out,  it  is  awkward  to 
find  fault  with  other  people  for  not  filling  out  their  moral  clothes. 
It  may  be  a  severe  measure  to  take  with  one's  self  but  the  surest 
way  to  be  kind  is  to  live  an  exposed  life. 

I  propose  to  live  the  next  few  years  in  a  glass  house. 
There  are  millions  of  other  men  who  want  to.  We  want  to  see 
if  we  cannot  at  last  live  confidentially  with  a  ■^orld,  live  naively 
and  simply  with  a  world  like  boys  and  like  great  men  and  like 
dogs! 

What  I  have  written,  I  have  written.  I  propose  to  run  the 
risk  of  being  good.  When  driven  to  it,  I  will  run  the  risk  of 
saying  I  am  good. 

My  motives  are  fairly  high.  See!  here  is  my  scale  of  one 
hundred!  I  had  rather  stand  forty -five  on  my  scale  than 
ninety-eight  on  yours! 

If  there  is  any  discrepancy  between  my  vision  and  my  action, 
I  am  not  going  to  be  bullied  out  of  my  life  and  out  of  living  my 
life  the  way  I  want  to,  by  the  way  I  look.  Though  it  mock  me, 
I  will  not  haul  down  my  flag.     I  will  haul  up  my  life ! 

Here  it  is  right  here  in  this  paragraph,  in  black  and  white.  I 
take  it  up  and  look  at  it,  I  read  it  once  more  and  lay  it  down. 

What  I  have  written,  I  have  written. 

Ill 

People  do  not  seem  to  agree  in  the  present  crisis  of  our  Ameri- 
can industrial  and  national  life,  about  the  necessity  of  getting  at 


NEWS-CROWDS  533 

the  facts  and  at  the  real  news  in  this  country  about  how  good  we 
are. 

Last  November  in  the  national  election,  four  and  a  half 
milUon  men  (Republicans)  said  to  Theodore  Roosevelt,  "  Theo- 
dore !  do  not  be  good  so  loud ! " 

Four  and  a  half  million  other  men,  also  Republicans,  told 
him  not  to  mind  what  anybody  said,  but  to  keep  right  on  being 
good  as  loud  as  he  liked,  for  as  long  as  it  seemed  necessary. 

They  wanted  to  be  sure  our  goodness  in  America  such  as  we 
had,  was  being  loud  enough  to  be  heard,  believed  in,  and  acted 
on  in  public. 

The  other  set  of  men,  last  November  (who  were  really  very 
good  too,  of  course),  were  more  sedate  and  liked  to  see  goodness 
modulated  more.  They  stood  out  for  what  might  be  called  a 
kind  of  moral  elegance. 

The  governing  difference  between  the  Roosevelt  type  and  the 
Taft  type  in  America  has  not  been  a  mere  difference  of  tempera- 
ment but  a  difference  in  news-sense,  in  a  sense  of  crisis  in  the 
nation. 

Thousands  of  men  of  all  parties,  with  the  nicest,  easiest  stand- 
pat  Taft  temperaments  in  the  world,  with  soft,  low  voices  and 
with  the  most  beautiful  moral  manners,  have  let  themselves 
join  in  a  national  attempt  to  shock  this  nation  into  seeing  how 
good  it  is.  A  great  temporary  crisis  can  only  be  met  by  a  great 
temporary  loudness. 

This  is  what  has  been  happening  in  America  during  the  last 
six  months.  At  last,  all  men  in  all  parties  are  engaged  in 
trying  to  find  out:  Is  it  true  or  not  true  that  we  want  to  be 
good.'' 

We  are  trying  to  get  the  news  through.  It  may  not  be  very 
becoming  to  us  and  we  know  as  well  as  any  one,  that  loudness, 
except  when  morally  deaf  people  drive  us  to  it  is  in  bad  taste. 
We  are  looking  forward,  every  one  of  us,  to  being  as  elegant  as 
any  one  is,  and  the  very  first  minute  we  get  the  morally  deaf 
people  out  of  office  where  we  will  not  have  to  go  about  shouting 


534  CROWDS 

out  at  them  —  we  will  tone  down  in  our  goodness.     We  will 
modulate  beautifully! 

IV 

There  are  three  other  bug-a-boos,  besides  the  Modesty 
Bug-a-boo  that  America  will  have  to  face  and  drive  out  of  the 
way  before  it  can  be  truly  said  to  have  a  national  character  or  to 
have  grown  up  and  found  itself.  There  is  the  Goody-good 
Bug-a-boo,  the  Consistency  Bug-a-boo,  and  the  Bug-a-boo  that 
Thomas  Jefferson  if  he  were  Uving  now,  would  never  never  ride 
in  a  carriage. 

Each  of  these  bug-a-boos  in  the  general  mistiness  and  muddle- 
headiness  of  the  time  can  be  seen  going  about,  saying,  "Boo! 
Boo!"  to  this  democracy  from  day  to  day  and  year  to  year, 
keeping  it  scared  into  not  getting  what  it  wants. 

There  is  not  one  of  them  that  will  not  evaporate  in  ten  min- 
utes the  first  morning  we  get  some  real  news  through  in  this 
country  about  ourselves  and  about  what  we  are  like. 

What  is  the  real  news  about  us,  for  instance,  as  regards  being 
goody-good.'* 

I  can  only  begin  with  the  news  for  one. 

For  years,  I  have  held  myself  back  from  taking  a  plain  or 
possibly  loud  stand  for  goodness  as  a  shrewd,  worldly-wise 
program  for  American  business  and  public  life,  because  I  was 
afraid  of  people,  and  afraid  people  would  think  I  was  trying  to 
improve  them. 

What  was  worse,  I  was  afraid  of  myself  too.  I  was  afraid  I 
really  would. 

I  am  afraid  now,  or  rather  I  would  be,  if  I  had  not  drilled 
through  to  the  news  about  myself  and  about  other  people  and 
about  human  nature  that  I  am  putting  into  this  chapter. 

I  have  written  five  hundred  pages  in  this  book  on  an 
awkward   and  dangerous  subject  like  the  Golden  Rule,   and 


NEWS-CROWDS  535 

I  appeal  to  the  reader  —  I  ask  him  humbly,  hopefully,  grate- 
fully if  he  can  honestly  say  (except  for  a  minute  here  and 
there  when  I  have  been  tired  and  shpped  up),  if  he  has  really 
felt  improved  or  felt  that  I  was  trying  to  improve  him  in 
this  book. 

On  your  honour,  Gentle  Reader  —  you  who  have  been  with 
me  five  hundred  pages! 

You  say  "Yes"? 

Then  I  appeal  to  your  sense  of  fairness.  If  you  truly  feel  I 
have  been  trying  to  improve  you  in  this  book,  turn  this  leaf 
down  here  and  stop.  It  is  only  fair  to  me.  Close  the  book  with 
your  improved  and  being  improved  feeHng  and  never  open  it 
again  until  it  passes  over.  You  have  no  right  to  go  on  page 
after  page  calling  me  names,  as  it  were,  right  in  the  middle  of 
my  own  book  in  this  way  behind  my  back,  you! — hundreds  and 
thousands  of  miles  away  from  me,  by  your  own  lamp,  by  your 
own  window  —  you  come  to  me  here  between  these  two  helpless 
pasteboard  covers  where  I  cannot  get  out  at  you,  where 
I  cannot  answer  back,  and  you  say  that  I  am  trying  to  im- 
prove you! 

Ah,  Gentle  Reader,  forgive  me!  God  forgive  me!  Believe 
me,  I  never  meant,  not  if  it  could  possibly  be  helped,  to  improve 
you!  If  you  insist  on  it  and  keep  saying  that  I  have  been 
improving  you,  all  I  can  say  is  that  I  was  merely  looking  as  if  t 
were  improving  you.  You  did  it.  I  did  not.  God  help  me  if 
I  am  trying  to  improve  you!  I  am  trying  to  find  out  in  this 
book  w^ho  I  am.  If,  incidentally,  while  I  am  quietly  working 
away  on  this  for  five  hundred  pages,  you  find  out  who  you  are 
yourself,  and  then  drop  into  a  gentle  glowing  improved  feeUng 
all  by  yourself,  do  not  mix  me  up  in  it.  I  deny  that  I  have  tried 
to  improve  you  or  anybody.  I  have  written  this  book  to  get 
my  own  way,  to  express  my  America.  I  have  written  it  to  say 
"i,"  to  say  "I,"  to  say  (the  first  minute  you  let  me),  "you  and 
I,"  to  say  we,  WE  about  America  —  to  drive  the  news  through 
to  a  President  of  what  America  is  Uke. 


536  CROWDS 

I  am  not  improving  you.     I  am  telling  you  what  may  or  may 
not  be  news  about  you. 
Take  it  or  leave  it. 


I  want  to  be  good. 

I  do  not  feel  superior  to  other  men. 

And  I  do  not  propose,  if  there  is  anything  I  can  do  about  it, 
to  be  compelled  to  feel  superior. 

I  beheve  we  all  want  to  be  good. 

The  one  thing  I  want  in  this  world  is  to  prove  it.  I  want  my 
own  way. 

I  am  not  going  to  slump  into  being  a  beautiful  character.  I 
have  written  this  book  to  get  my  own  way. 

I  have  said  I  will  not  be  mixed  up  in  the  fate  of  people  who 
do  not  know  where  they  are  going,  who  have  not  decided  what 
they  are  like,  who  do  not  know  who  they  are.  What  do  the 
people  want?  Some  people  tell  me  they  want  nothing.  They 
tell  me  it  would  only  make  things  worse  and  stir  things  up  for 
me  to  want  to  be  good. 

Or  perhaps  they  think  it  is  beautiful  to  lower  the  price  of  oil. 
They  want  oil  at  seven  cents  a  gallon. 

Do  they.?     Do  you.?     Do  I? 

I  say  no.  Let  oil  wait.  I  want  to  raise  the  price  of  men  and 
to  put  a  market  value  on  human  life. 

I  find  as  I  look  about  me  that  there  are  two  classes  of  states- 
men offering  to  be  helpful  in  making  life  worth  living  in  America. 

There  are  the  statesmen  who  think  we  are  going  to  be  good 
and  who  believe  in  a  program  which  trusts  and  exalts  the  people 
and  the  leaders  of  the  people. 

There  are  the  statesmen  who  seem  to  believe  that  American 
human  nature  does  not  amount  to  enough  to  be  good.  They 
are  planning  a  program  on  the  principle  that  the  best  that  can 
be  done  with  human  nature  in  America  in  business  and  public 
life  is  to  have  it  expurgated. 


NEWS-CROWDS  537 

Which  class  of  statesmen  do  we  want? 

In  some  of  our  state  prisons  men  who  are  not  considered  fit 
to  reproduce  themselves  are  steriHzed.  The  question  that  is 
now  up  before  this  country  is,  Do  we  or  do  we  not  want  Ameri- 
can business  sterilized?  Are  we  or  are  we  not  going  to  put  a 
national  penalty  on  all  initiative  in  all  business  men  because 
some  men  abuse  it? 

There  is  but  one  thing  that  can  save  us,  namely,  proving  to 
one  another  and  to  our  public  men,  that  we  are  good,  that  we 
are  going  to  be  good  and  that  we  know  how.  We  face  the  issue 
to-day.     Two  definite  programs  are  before  the  country. 

Those  who  have  put  their  faith  in  being  afraid  of  one  another 
as  a  national  policy  have  devised  several  By-laws  for  an  Expur- 
gated America. 

They  say,  eliminate  the  right  of  a  man  to  do  wrong.  Deny 
him  the  right  of  moral  experiment  because  some  of  his  experi- 
ments do  not  work.  We  say  let  him  try.  We  can  look  out  for 
ourselves  or  we  wiU  have  bigger  men  than  he  is,  to  look  outforus. 

They  say,  eliminate  the  right  of  a  man  to  be  an  owner,  be- 
cause nobody  has  the  courage  to  believe  that  a  man  can  express 
his  best  self  in  property.  We  say  that  property  may  express  a 
man's  religion,  and  that  the  way  a  man  has  of  being  rich  or  of 
being  poor  may  be  an  art-form. 

Most  men  can  express  themselves  better  in  property  than  in 
anything  else. 

They  say,  eliminate  all  monopoly  indiscriminately  and  the 
occasional  logical  eflBciency  of  monopoly  because  it  has  not 
worked  well  for  the  people  the  first  few  times  and  because  we 
have  not  learned  how  to  handle  it.  We  say  learn  how  to 
handle  it. 

They  say  eliminate  the  middleman.  They  say  that  the  one 
strategic  man  in  every  industry  who  can  represent  everybody 
if  he  wants  to,  who  can  be  a  great  man  and  who  can  make  a 
great  industry  serve  everybody,  must  be  eliminated  because  no- 
body believes  America  can  produce  a  middleman.     We  say 


538  CROWDS 

instead  of  weakly  and  helplessly  giving  up  a  great  spiritual 
and  morally-engineering  institution  like  the  middleman  because 
the  average  middleman  does  not  know  his  job,  we  say :  Exalt 
the  middleman  raise  him  to  the  n*^  power,  make  him  —  well  — • 
do  you  remember.  Gentle  Reader,  the  walking  beams  on  the  old 
sidewheel  steamers?  We  say  do  not  eliminate  him  —  lift  him 
up  —  make  him  what  he  naturally  is  and  is  in  position  to  be  — ■ 
the  walking  beam  of  Business ! 

If  the  average  middleman  does  not  know  how  to  be  a  real 
middleman  we  will  make  one  who  does. 

And  all  the  other  eliminations  that  we  have  watched  people 
being  scared  into,  one  by  one,  we  wiU  turn  into  exaltations  — 
each  in  its  own  kind  and  place.  There  is  not  one  of  our  fears 
that  is  not  the  suggestion,  the  mighty  outline,  the  inspiration 
for  the  world's  next  new  size  and  new  kind  of  American  man. 
We  say  place  the  position  before  the  man  —  with  its  fears,  with 
its  songs,  with  its  challenge.  We  say,  tell  him  what  we  expect 
of  him  and  demand  of  him.  Put  him  in  a  high  place  on  a  plat- 
form before  the  world !  There  with  the  truth  about  him  written 
on  his  forehead  in  the  sight  of  all  the  people,  call  him  by  name, 
glorify  him  or  behead  him !  We  are  men  and  we  are  Americans. 
We  will  stand  up  to  each  of  our  dangers  one  by  one.  Each  and 
every  danger  of  them  is  a  romance,  a  sublime  adventure,  a 
nation-maker.  Our  threats,  our  very  by-words  and  despairs, 
we  will  take  up,  and,  in  the  sight  of  the  world,  forge  them  into 
shrewd  faiths  and  into  mighty  men! 

This  is  my  news  or  vision.  I  say  that  this  is  where  we  are 
going  in  America.  I  compel  no  man  to  follow  my  news  but  I 
will  pursue  him  with  my  news  until  he  gives  me  his! 


This  news,  I  am  telling,  Gentle  Reader,  is  perhaps  news  about 
you. 

If  it  is  not  true  news,  say  so.  Say  what  is.  We  all  have  a 
right  to  know.     The  one  compulsion  of  modern  life  is  our  right 


NEWS-CROWDS  539 

to  know,  our  right  to  compel  people  who  live  on  the  same  con- 
tinent or  who  Uve  in  the  same  country  with  us,  to  open  up  their 
hearts,  to  furnish  us  with  their  share  of  the  materials  for  a 
mutual  understanding,  or  for  a  definite  mutual  misunderstand- 
ing, on  which  to  live. 

It  is  the  one  compulsion  of  which  we  will  be  guilty.  All 
liberty  is  in  it.  These  people  who  have  to  live  with  us  and  that 
we  have  to  live  with,  these  people  who  breathe  the  same  moral 
air  with  us,  drink  the  same  water  with  us,  these  people  who  have 
their  moral  dumps,  who  throw  away  their  moral  garbage  with 
us  —  these  people  who  will  not  help  provide  some  daily,  mutual 
understanding  for  these  common  decencies  for  our  souls  to  hve 
together  —  these  people  we  defy  and  challenge!  We  will  com- 
pel them  to  reveal  themselves.  We  will  drive  them  away,  or  we 
will  drive  them  into  driving  us  away,  if  they  will  not  yield  to 
us  what  is  in  their  hearts  —  Mars,  hell,  anywhere  we  go,  it 
matters  not  to  us  where  we  go,  except  that  we  cannot  and  we 
will  not  live  with  men  about  us  who  thrust  down  their  true  feel- 
ings and  their  real  desires  into  a  kind  of  manhole  under  them, 
and  sit  on  the  hd  and  smile.  Some  seem  to  have  manholes 
and  some  have  safes  or  spiritual  banks,  and  there  are  others 
who  have  convenient,  dim,  beautiful  clouds  in  the  sky  to  hidfe 
their  feelings  in.  But  whatever  their  real  feelings  are,  and 
wherever  they  keep  them,  they  belong  to  us. 

We  insist  on  having  or  on  making  mutual  arrangements  to 
have,  if  we  live  in  crowds,  some  kind  of  spiritual  rapid  transit 
system  for  getting  our  minds  through  to  one  another.  We 
demand  a  system  for  having  the  streets  of  our  souls  decently 
lighted,  some  provision  for  moral  sewers,  for  air  or  atmosphere 
—  and  all  the  common  conveniences  for  having  decent  and 
self-respecting  souls  in  crowds  —  all  the  inteUigence-machines, 
the  love-machines,  the  hope-machines,  and  the  belie ving-machines 
that  the  crowds  must  have  for  Uving  decently,  for  hving  with 
beauty,  hving  with  considerateness  and  respect  in  this  awful 
daily  sublime  presence  of  one  another's  lives! 


540  CROWDS 

We  shall  still  have  our  splendid  isolations  when  we  need 
them,  some  of  us,  and  our  little  solitudes  of  meanness,  but  the 
main  common  fund  of  motives  for  living  together,  for  growing 
up  into  a  world  together,  the  desires,  motives,  and  intentions  in 
men's  hearts,  their  desires  toward  us  and  ours  toward  them,  we 
are  going  to  know  and  compel  to  be  made  known.  We  will 
fight  men  to  the  death  to  know  them. 

Have  we  not  fought,  you  and  I,  Gentle  Reader,  all  of  us,  each 
man  of  us,  all  our  years,  all  our  days,  to  drive  through  to  some 
sort  of  mutual  understanding  with  our  own  selves?  Now  we 
will  fight  through  to  some  mutual  understanding  with  one 
another  and  with  the  world. 

We  will  knock  on  every  door,  make  a  house  to  house  canvass 
of  the  souls  of  the  world,  pursue  every  man,  sing  under  his 
windows.  We  will  undergird  his  consciousness  and  his  dreams. 
We  will  make  the  birds  sing  to  him  in  the  morning,  "  Where  are 
you  going?"  We  will  put  up  a  sign  at  the  foot  of  his  bed  for 
his  eyes  to  fall  on  when  he  awakes,  "  Where  are  you  going?" 

Whatever  it  is  that  works  best,  if  we  blow  it  out  of  you  with 
dynamite  or  love  or  fear  or  draw  it  out  of  you  with  some  mighty 
singing  going  past  —  ah,  brother,  we  will  have  it  out  of  you ! 
You  shall  be  our  brother!  We  will  be  your  brother  though  we 
die! 

We  will  live  together  or  we  will  die  together. 

What  do  you  really  want?  What  do  you  really  hke?  Who 
are  you? 

We  may  pile  together  all  our  funny,  fearful,  little  Dread- 
noughts, our  stodgy  dead  lumps  of  men  called  armies,  and  what 
are  they?  And  what  do  they  amount  to  and  what  can  they  do, 
as  compared  with  truth,  the  real  news  about  what  people  want 
in  this  world,  and  about  where  we  are  going? 

I  say  —  they  shall  be  as  nothing  as  a  rending  force,  as  a  glory 
to  tear  down  and  rebuild  a  world,  as  compared  with  the  truth, 
with  the  news  about  us,  that  shall  come  out  at  last  (God  hasten 
the  day!)  from  the  open  —  the  pried-open  hearts  of  men! 


NEWS-CROWDS  541 

And  I  have  seen  that  men  shall  go  forth  with  shouts  in  that 
day  and  with  glad  and  solemn  silence,  to  build  a  world ! 


I  wonder  if  I  have  faced  down  the  Goody-good  Bug-a-boo. 

I  speak  for  five  million  men. 

We  have  got  this  book  written  between  us  (under  the  name 
of  one  of  us),  because  we  want  our  own  way.  We  are  not  im- 
proving people.  We  are  not  even  trying  to  improve  ourselves. 
Many  of  us  started  in  on  it  once  and  the  first  improvement  we 
thought  of  was  not  to  try  any  more. 

It  is  a  great  deal  harder  to  try  to  live.  Few  people  want  us 
to  —  most  people  get  in  the  way.  And  when  people  get  in  the 
way  we  lay  about  us  a  little  —  We  hit  them.  We  have  written 
this  book,  because  we  want  to  hit  a  great  many  people  at  once. 
We  find  them  everywhere  about  us,  in  monster  cities,  huge 
thoughtless  anthills  of  them,  and  they  will  not  let  us  five  a  larger 
and  a  richer  life.  We  say  to  them,  We  resent  your  houses  your 
shoes,  your  voices,  your  fears,  your  motives,  your  wills,  the 
diseases  you  make  us  walk  past  every  day,  the  rows  of  things 
you  seem  to  think  will  do,  and  that  you  think  we  must  get  used 
to,  and  we  do  not  propose,  if  we  can  help  it,  to  get  used  to  what 
you  think  will  do  for  Churches;  nor  to  what  you  think  will  do 
for  a  government  or  to  the  little  lonely,  scattered,  toyschool- 
houses,  that  when  you  come  into  the  world,  fresh  and  strange 
and  happy  you  all  proceed  solemnly  to  coop  your  souls  in. 
Nor  do  we  want  to  get  used  to  your  hem-and-haw  parliaments 
and  your  funny  little  perfumed  prophets  —  your  prophets 
lying  down  or  propped  up  with  pillows  or  your  poets  wringing 
their  hands.  Nor  will  we  be  put  off  with  all  your  gracefully 
feeble,  watery,  lovely  little  pastel  religions  for  this  grim  and 
mighty  modem  world.  We  are  American  men.  We  do  not  pro- 
pose to  be  driven  out  to  sea,  to  stand  face  to  face  every  day  with 
what  is  true  and  full  of  beauty  and  magic,  or  to  have  skies  and 


542  CROWDS 

mountains  and  stars  palmed  off  on  us  as  companions  instead  of 
men! 

This  is  what  five  million  men  are  trying  to  express  in  writing 
this  book.  If  people  deny  that  I  have  the  right  to  give  the 
news  about  America  for  five  million  men;  if  they  say  that  this 
is  not  true  about  American  human  nature,  that  this  is  not  the 
news,  then  I  will  say,  /  am  the  news!  I  am  this  sort  of  an 
American!  God  helping  me,  I  say  it!  "Look  at  me!"  I  am 
this  sort  of  man  of  whom  I  am  writing!  If  I  am  not  this  sort  of 
man  this  afternoon,  I  will  be  in  the  morning!  Though  I  go 
down  as  a  hiss  and  as  laughter  and  as  a  by-word  and  a  mocking 
to  the  end  of  my  days  —  /  am  this  sort  of  man!  I  say,  "Look 
at  m£!" 

If  you  will  not  believe  me  —  that  this  is  an  American,  if  you 
say  that  I  cannot  prove  that  there  are  five  million  of  men  like 
this  in  America,  then  I  will  still  say,  "Here  is  one!"  What  will 
you  do  with  ME?"  Though  I  die  in  laughter,  all  my  desires 
and  all  my  professions  in  a  tumult  about  my  soul,  I  say  it  to 
this  nation,  "Your  laws,  your  programs,  your  philosophies, 
your  I  wills,  and  I  won'ts,  I  say,  shall  reckon  with  me!  Your 
presidents  and  your  legislatures  shall  reckon  with  Me !" 

Here  I  am.     The  man  is  here.     He  is  in  this  book! 

I  will  break  through  to  the  five  million  men.  I  will  make  the 
five  miUion  men  look  at  me  until  they  recognize  themselves. 
If  no  one  else  will  attend  to  it  for  me,  and  if  there  shall  be  no 
other  way,  I  will  have  a  brass  band  go  through  the  streets  of 
New  York  and  of  a  thousand  cities,  with  banners  and  floats  and 
great  hymns  to  the  people,  and  they  shall  go  up  and  down  the 
streets  of  the  people  with  signs  saying,  "Have  you  read  Crowds.'' 
I  will  have  the  Boston  Symphony  Orchestra  tour  the  country 
singing  —  singing  from  kettledrums  to  violins  to  a  thousand 
silent  audiences,  "Have  you  read  *  CROWDS'?" 

I  live  in  a  nation  in  which  we  are  butting  through  into  our 
sense  of  our  national  character,  working  our  way  up  into  a 
huge  mutual  working  understanding.     In  our  beautiful,  vague. 


NEWS-CROWDS  543 

patriotic,  muddleheadedness  about  what  we  want  and  whether 
we  really  want  to  be  good,  and  about  what  being  good  is  like 
and  I  say,  for  one,  half-laughing,  half-praying,  God  helping  me 

—  Look  at  ME! 

VI 

I  was  much  interested  some  time  ago  when  I  had  not 
been  long  landed  in  England,  and  was  still  trying  in  the  hopeful 
American  way  to  understand  it  —  to  see  the  various  attitudes 
of  Englishmen  toward  the  discussions  which  were  going  on  at 
that  time  in  the  Spectator  and  elsewhere,  of  Mr.  Cadbury's 
inconsistency;  and  while  I  had  no  reason,  as  an  American, 
fresh-landed  from  New  York,  to  be  interested  in  Mr.  Cadbury 
himself,  I  found  that  his  inconsistency  interested  me  very 
much.  It  insisted  on  coming  back  into  my  mind,  in  spite  of 
what  I  would  have  thought,  as  a  strangely  important  subject 

—  not  merely  as  regards  Mr.  Cadbury,  which  might  or  might 
not  be  important,  but  as  regards  England  and  as  regards 
America,  as  regards  the  way  a  modern  man  struggling  day  by  day 
with  a  huge,  heavy  machine  civilization  like  ours,  can  still  man- 
age to  be  a  live,  useful,  and  possibly  even  a  human,  being  in  it. 

There  are  two  astonishing  facts  that  stand  face  to  face  with 
all  of  us  to-day,  who  are  labouring  with  civihzation. 

The  first  fact  is  that  almost  without  exception  all  the  men  in 
it  who  mean  the  most  in  it  to  us  and  to  other  people  for  good  or 
for  evil  —  who  stir  us  deeply  and  do  things  —  all  faU  into  the 
inconsistent  class. 

The  second  fact  is  that  this  is  a  very  small,  select  distin- 
guished, and  astonishingly  capable  class. 

A  man  who  is  in  a  grim,  serious  business  like  being  good,  must 
expect  to  give  up  many  of  his  little  self-indulgences  in  the  way 
of  looking  good.  Looking  inconsistent,  possibly  even  incon- 
sistency itself,  may  be  sometimes,  temporarily,  a  man's  most 
important  pubhc  service  to  his  time. 


544  CROWDS 

One  needs  but  a  little  glance  at  history,  or  even  at  one's 
own  personal  history.  It  is  by  being  inconsistent  that  people 
grow,  and  without  meaning  to,  give  other  people  materials  for 
growing.  For  the  particular  purpose  of  making  the  best  things 
grow,  of  pointing  up  truths,  of  giving  definite  edges  to  right  and 
wrong,  an  inconsistent  man  —  a  man  who  is  trying  to  pry  him- 
self out  a  little  at  a  time  from  an  impossible  situation  in  an  im- 
possible world,  is  likely  to  do  the  world  more  good  than  a  verj' 
large  crowd  of  angels  who  have  made  up  their  minds  that  they 
are  going  to  be  consistent  and  going  to  keep  up  a  consistent  look 
in  this  same  world  —  whatever  happens  to  it. 


If  one  is  marking  people  on  consistency,  and  if  one  takes  a 
scale  of  100  as  perfect,  perhaps  one  should  not  always  insist 
on  98.  One  does  not  always  insist  on  98  for  one's  self.  And 
when  one  does  and  does  not  get  it,  one  feels  forgiving  sometimes. 

In  dealing  with  public  men  and  with  other  people  that  we 
know  less  than  we  know  ourselves  —  if  they  really  do  things,  it 
is  well  to  make  allowances,  and  let  them  off  at  65. 

In  some  cases,  in  fact,  when  men  are  doing  something  that  no 
one  else  volunteers  to  do  for  a  world,  I  find  I  get  on  very  well 
with  letting  them  off  at  51.  I  have  sometimes  wished,  when  I 
have  been  in  England,  that  Tories  and  Liberals  and  Socialists  and 
the  Wise  and  the  Good  would  consider  letting  George  Cadbury 
oflp  at  51. 

Perhaps  people  are  being  more  safely  educated  by  George 
Cadbury  in  his  journals  than  they  might  be  by  other  people  in 
what  seem  to  seem  to  many  of  us  unfamiliar  and  dangerous 
ideas. 

Perhaps  posterity,  in  1953,  looking  down  this  precipice  of 
revolution  England  did  not  fall  into  in  1913,  may  mark  George 
Cadbury  73  —  possibly  89. 

If,  in  any  way,  in  the  crisis  of  England,  George  Cadbury  can 
crowd  in  and  can  keep  thousands  and  thousands  of  Englishmen 


NEWS-CROWDS  545 

and  women  from  being  educated  by  John  Bottomley  Bull  or 
by  Mrs,  John  Bottomley  Bull  and  hosts  of  other  would-be 
friends  of  the  people  —  by  Tom  Mann,  Ben  Tillett,  and  Vernon 
Hartshorn,  does  it  really  seem  after  all  a  matter  of  grave  na- 
tional importance  that  George  Cadbury  —  a  professional  non- 
better  —  in  educating  these  people  should  allow  them  to  keep 
on  in  his  paper,  having  a  betting  column? 

So  long  as  he  really  helps  stave  off  John  Bottomley  Bull  and 
Mrs.  John  Bottomley  Bull,  let  him  slump  into  being  a  million- 
aire, if  he  cannot  very  well  help  it!  We  say,  some  of  us, 
let  him  even  make  cocoa!  or  have  family  prayers!  or  be  a 
Liberal ! 

At  least  this  is  the  way  one  American  visiting  England  feels 
about  it,  if  he  may  be  permitted. 

Perhaps  I  would  not,  if  I  were  an  angel. 

I  do  not  want  to  be  an  angel. 

I  am  more  ambitious,  I  want  my  ideals  to  do  things,  and 
I  want  to  stand  by  people  who  are  doing  things  with  their  ideals, 
whether  their  ideals  are  my  ideals  or  not. 


Let  us  suppose.  Suppose  the  reader  were  in  Mr.  Cadbury^'s 
place.  What  would  he  do?  Here  are  two  things,  let  us 
suppose,  he  wishes  very  much.  He  wishes  a  certain  class  of 
people  would  not  bet,  and  he  also  wishes  to  convince  these  same 
people  of  certain  important  social  and  political  ideas  for  which 
he  stands.  If  he  told  them  that  he  would  have  nothing  to 
do  with  them  unless  they  stopped  betting,  there  would  be  no 
object  in  his  publishing  their  paper  at  all.  There  would  be 
nothing  that  they  would  let  him  tell  them.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  he  begins  merely  as  one  more  humble,  fellow-human  being, 
and  puts  himself  definitely  on  record  as  not  betting  himself, 
and  still  more  definitely  as  wishing  other  people  would  not  bet, 
and  then  admits  honestly  that  these  other  people  have  as  good  a 
right  to  decide  to  bet  as  he  has  to  decide  not  to;  and  if  he  then 


546  CROWDS 

deliberately  proceeds  to  do  what  every  real  gentleman  who  does 
not  smoke  and  wishes  other  people  did  not,  does  without  ques- 
tion —  namely,  offers  them  the  faciUties  for  doing  it  why  should 
people  call  him  inconsistent? 

Perhaps  a  man's  consistency  consists  in  his  relation  to  his  own 
smoking  and  betting  and  not  in  his  rushing  his  consistency  over 
into  the  smoking  and  betting  of  other  people.  Perhaps  being 
consistent  does  not  need  to  mean  being  a  little  pharisaical,  or 
using  force,  or  cutting  people  off  and  having  no  argument  with 
them,  in  one  matter,  because  one  cannot  agree  with  them  in 
another.  Of  course,  I  admit  it  would  be  better  if  Mr.  Cadbury 
would  publish  in  a  parallel  column  (if  he  could  get  a  genius  to 
write  it)  an  extremely  tolerant,  human,  comrade-like  series  of 
objections  to  betting,  which  people  could  read  alongside,  and 
which  would  persuade  people  as  much  as  possible  not  to  read 
the  best  betting  tips  in  the  world  in  the  column  next  door,  but 
certainly  the  act  of  furnishing  the  tips  in  the  meantime  and  of 
being  sure  that  they  are  the  best  tips  in  the  world,  is  a  very 
real,  human,  courageous  act.  It  even  has  a  kind  of  rough  and 
ready  religion  in  it.  It  may  be  too  much  to  expect,  but  even  in 
our  goodness  perhaps  we  ought  to  do  as  we  would  be  done  by. 
We  must  be  righteous,  but  on  the  whole,  must  we  not  be  righte- 
ous toward  others  as  we  would  have  them  righteous  toward 
us.?* 

What  many  of  us  find  ourselves  wishing  most  of  all,  when  we 
come  upon  some  specially  attractive  man  is,  that  we  could  dis- 
cover some  way,  or  that  he  could  discover  some  way,  in  which 
the  idealist  in  him,  and  the  reaUst  in  him  could  be  got  to  act 
together. 

There  are  some  of  us  who  have  come  to  believe  that  in  the 
dead  earnest,  daily,  almost  desperate  struggle  of  modem  life, 
the  real  solid  idealist  will  have  to  care  enough  about  his  ideals 
to  arrange  to  have  two  complete  sets,  one  set  which  he  calls 
his  personal  ideals,  which  are  of  such  a  nature  that  he  can  carry 
them  out  alone  and  rigidly  and  quite  by  himself,  and  another 


NEWS-CROWDS  547 

which  he  calls  his  bending  or  cooperative  ideafs,  geared  a  little 
lower  and  adjusted  to  more  gradual  usage,  which  he  uses  when 
he  asks  other  men  to  act  with  him. 

It  may  take  a  very  single-hearted  and  strong  man  to  keep 
before  his  own  mind  and  before  other  people's  his  two  sets  of 
ideals,  his  "I"  faiths,  and  his  you-and-I  faiths,  keeping  each  in 
strict  proportion,  but  it  would  certainly  be  a  great  human  adven- 
ture to  do  it.  Saying  "God  and  I,"  and  saying  "God  and  you 
a  ad  I"  are  two  different  arts.  And  it  is  clear-headedness  and 
not  inconsistency  in  a  man  that  keeps  him  so. 

This  is  not  a  mere  defence  of  Mr.  Cadbury;  it  is  a  defence  of 
a  type  of  man,  of  a  temperament  in  our  modem  life,  of  men 
hke  Edward  A.  Filene,  of  Boston,  of  a  man  hke  Hugh  Mac  Rae, 
one  of  the  institutions  of  North  Carolina,  of  Tom  L.  Johnson 
of  Cleveland,  of  nine  men  out  of  ten  of  the  bigger  and 
more  creative  sort  who  are  helping  cities  to  get  their  way 
and  nations  to  express  themselves.  I  have  believed  that  the 
principle  at  stake,  the  great  principle  for  real  life  in  England  and 
in  America,  of  letting  a  man  be  inconsistent  if  he  knows  how — 
must  have  a  stand  made  for  it. 

There  is  no  one  thing,  whether  in  history,  or  literature,  or 
science,  or  politics  that  can  be  more  crucial  in  the  fate  of  a 
nation  to-day  than  the  correct,  just,  and  constructive  judgment 
of  Contemporary  Inconsistent  People. 

VII 

If  I  could  have  managed  it,  I  would  have  had  this  book 
printed  and  written  —  every  page  of  it  —  in  three  parallel 
columns. 

The  first  column  would  be  for  the  reader  who  believes  it, 
who  keeps  writing  a  book  more  or  less  like  it  as  he  goes  along. 
I  would  put  in  one  sentence  at  the  top  for  him  and  then  let 
him  have  the  rest  of  the  space  to  write  in  himself.  In  other 
words  I  would  say  2  plus  2  equals  4  and  drop  it. 

The  second  column  would  be  for  the  reader  who  would  like 


548  CROWDS 

to  believe  it  if  he  could,  and  I  would  branch  out  a  little  more  — - 
about  half  a  column. 

2+2=4 

20+20=40 

The  third  column  would  be  for  the  reader  who  is  not  going 
to  believe  it  if  it  can  be  helped.  It  would  be  in  fine  type, 
bitterly  detailed  and  statistical  and  take  nothing  for  granted. 

2+2=4 

20+20=40 

200+200=400 

2,000+2,000=4,000 

20,000+20,000=40,000 

etc. 

This  arrangement  would  make  the  book  what  might  be 
called  a  Moving  Sidewalk  of  Truth.  First  sidewalk  rather 
quick  (six  miles  an  hour).  Second,  four  pailes  an  hour.  Third, 
two  miles  an  hour.  People  could  move  over  from  one  sidewalk 
to  the  other  in  the  middle  of  an  idea  any  time,  and  go  faster  or 
slower  as  they  liked  to,  needed  to. 

No  one  would  accuse  me  —  though  I  might  like  or  need  for 
my  own  personal  use  at  one  time  or  another,  a  slower  sidewalk 
or  a  faster  one  than  others  - —  no  one  would  accuse  me  of  being 
inconsistent  if  I  supplied  extra  sidewalks  for  people  of  different 
temperaments  to  move  over  to  suddenly  any  time  they  wanted 
to.  I  have  come  to  some  of  my  truth  by  a  bitterly  slow  side- 
walk —  slower  than  other  people  need,  and  sometimes  I  have 
come  by  a  fast  one  (or  what  some  would  say  was  no  sidewalk 
at  all!)  but  it  cannot  fairly  be  claimed  that  there  is  anything 
inconsistent  in  my  offering  people  every  possible  convenience 
I  can  think  of  —  for  believing  me. 

Mr.  Cadbury  is  not  inconsistent  if  he  tells  truth  at  a  different 
rate  to  different  people,  or  if  he  chooses  to  put  truths  before 
people  in  Indian  file. 

A  man  is  not  inconsistent  who  does  not  tell  all  the  news  he 
I;nows  to  all  kinds  of  people,  all  at  once,  all  the  time. 


NEWS-CROWDS  549 

There  is  nothing  disingenuous  about  having  an  order  for 
truth. 

It  is  not  considered  compromising  to  have  an  order  in  moving 
railway  trains.  Why  not  allow  an  order  in  moving  trains  of 
thought?  And  why  should  a  schedule  for  moving  around 
people's  bodies  be  considered  any  more  reasonable  than  a 
schedule  or  timetable  or  order  for  moving  around  their  souls.'' 

Truth  in  action  must  always  be  in  an  order.  Nine  idealists 
out  of  ten  who  fight  against  News-men,  or  men  who  are  trying 
to  make  the  beautiful  work,  and  who  call  them  hypocrites, 
would  not  do  it  if  they  were  trying  desperately  to  make  the 
beautiful  work  themselves.  It  is  more  comfortable  and  has 
a  fine  free  look,  to  be  blunt  with  the  beautiful  —  the  way  a 
Poet  is  —  to  dump  all  one's  ideals  down  before  people  and  walk 
off.  But  it  seems  to  some  of  us  a  cold,  sentimental,  lazy,  and 
ignoble  thing  to  do  with  ideals  if  one  loves  them  —  to  give 
everybody  all  of  them  all  the  time  without  considering  what 
becomes  of  the  ideals  or  what  becomes  of  the  people. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
CROWD-MEN 


March  4,  1913. 


AS  I  write  these  words,  I  look  out  upon  the  great  meadow. 
I  see  the  poles  and  the  wires  in  the  sun,  that  long  trail  of  poles 
and  wires  I  am  used  to,  stalking  across  the  meadow. 

I  know  what  they  are  doing. 

They  are  telling  a  thousand  cities  and  villages  about  our  new 
President,  the  one  they  are  making  this  minute,  down  in  Wash- 
ington, for  these  United  States.  With  his  hand  lifted  up  he  has 
just  taken  his  oath,  has  sworn  before  God  and  before  his  people 
to  serve  the  destinies  of  a  nation.  And  now  along  a  hundred 
thousand  miles  of  wire  on  dumb  wooden  poles,  a  hope,  a  prayer, 
a  kind  of  quiet,  stern  singing  of  a  mighty  people  goes  by. 

And  I  am  sitting  here  in  my  study  window  wondering  what 
he  will  be  like,  what  he  will  think,  and  what  he  will  believe 
about  us. 

What  will  our  new  President  do  with  these  hundreds  of  miles 
of  prayer,  of  crying  to  God,  stretched  up  to  him  out  of  the  hills 
and  out  of  the  plains? 

Does  he  really  overhear  it  —  that  huge,  dumb,  half -helpless, 
half-defiant  prayer  going  up  past  him,  out  of  the  eager,  hoarse 
cities,  out  of  the  slow,  patient  fields,  to  God? 

Does  he  overhear  it,  I  wonder?  What  does  he  make  out 
that  we  are  like? 

I  should  think  it  would  sound  like  music  to  him. 

It  would  come  to  seem,  I  should  think,  when  he  is  alone 
with  his  God  (and  will  he  not  please  be  alone  with  his  God  some- 
times?), like  some  vast  ocean  of  people  singing,  a  kind  of  multi- 

550 


CROWD-MEN  551 

tudinous,  faraway  singing,  like  the  wind  —  ah,  how  often 
have  I  heard  the  wind  like  some  strange  and  mighty  people 
in  the  pine  treetops  go  singing  by! 

I  do  not  see  how  a  President  could  help  growing  a  little  like  a 
poet  —  down  in  his  heart  —  as  he  listens. 

If  he  does,  he  may  do  as  he  will  with  us. 

We  will  let  him  be  an  artist  in  a  nation. 

As  Winslow  Homer  takes  the  sea,  as  Millet  takes  the  peas- 
ants in  the  fields,  as  Frank  Brangwyn  Ufts  up  the  labour  in 
the  miUs  and  makes  it  colossal  and  sublime,  the  President  is  an 
artist,  in  touching  the  crowd's  imagination  with  itself  —  in 
making  a  nation  self-conscious. 

He  shall  be  the  artist,  the  composer,  the  portrait  painter  of 
the  people  —  their  faith,  their  cry,  their  anger,  and  their  love 
shall  be  in  him.  In  him  shall  be  seen  the  panorama  of  the 
crowd,  focused  into  a  single  face.  In  him  there  shall  be  put 
in  the  foreground  of  this  nation's  countenance  the  things  that 
belong  in  the  foreground.  And  the  things  that  belong  in  the 
background  shall  be  put  in  the  background,  and  the  little  ideas 
a  nd  little  men  shall  look  little  in  it,  and  the  big  ones  shall  look 
big. 

They  do  not  look  so  now.  This  is  the  one  thing  that  is  the 
matter  with  America.  The  countenence  of  the  nation  is  not  a 
composed  countenance.  All  that  we  want  is  latent  in  us,  every- 
thing is  there  in  our  Washington  face.  The  face  merely  lacks 
features  and  an  expression. 

This  is  what  a  President  is  for  —  to  give  at  last  the  Face  of 
the  United  States  an  expression ! 

If  he  is  a  shrewd  poet  and  beheves  in  us,  we  shall  accept 
him  as  the  official  mind  reader  of  the  nation.  He  focuses  our 
desires.  In  the  weariness  of  the  day  he  looks  away  —  he 
looks  up  —  he  leans  his  head  upon  his  hand  —  through  the 
corridors  of  his  brain,  that  httle  silent  Main  street  of  America, 
the  thoughts  and  the  crowds  and  the  jostling  wills  of  thvj 
people  go. 


552  CROWDS 

If  he  is  a  shrewd  poet  about  us,  he  becomes  the  organic  func- 
tion, the  organizer  of  the  news  about  our  people  to  ourselves. 
He  is  the  public  made  visible,  the  public  made  one.  He  is  a 
moving  picture  of  us.  He  speaks  and  gestures  the  United  States 
—  if  he  is  a  poet  about  us  —  when  he  beckons  or  points  or  when 
he  puts  his  finger  on  his  lips,  or  when  he  says,  "Hush!"  or  when 
he  says,  "Wait  a  moment!"  he  is  the  voice  of  the  people  of  the 
United  States. 


I  am  sitting  and  correcting,  one  by  one,  as  they  are  brought 
to  me,  these  last  page  proofs  in  the  factory.  The  low  thunder 
on  the  floors  of  the  mighty  presses,  crashing  down  into  paper 
words  I  can  never  cross  out  —  rises  around  me.  In  a  minute 
more  —  minute  by  minute  that  I  am  counting,  that  low  thunder 
will  overtake  me,  will  roar  down  and  fold  away  these  last 
guilty,  hopeful,  tucked-in  words  with  you,  Gentle  Reader,  and 
you  will  get  away!     And  the  book  will  get  away! 

There  is  no  time  to  try  to  hold  up  that  low  thunder  now,  and 
to  say  what  I  have  meant  to  say  about  false  simplicity  and 
democracy,  and  about  our  all  being  bullied  into  being  little  old 
faded  Thomas  Jeffersons  a  hundred  years  after  he  is  dead. 

But  I  will  try  to  suggest  what  I  hope  that  some  one  who  has 
no  printing-presses  rolling  over  him  —  will  say : 

One  cannot  help  wishing  that  our  socialists  to-day  would 
outgrow  Karl  Marx,  and  that  our  individualists  would  out- 
grow Emerson.  Democrats  by  this  time  ought  to  grow  a  little, 
too,  and  outgrow  Jefferson,  and  Republicans  ought  to  be  able 
by  this  time  to  outgrow  Hamilton. 

Why  not  drop  Karl  Marx  and  Emerson  and  run  the  gamut  of 
both  of  them,  on  a  continent  3,000  miles  wide?  Why  should  we 
live  Thomas  Jefferson's  and  Alexander  Hamilton's  lives .f^  Why 
not  drop  Jefferson  and  Hamilton  and  live  ours.'* 

The  last  thing  that  Jefferson  would  do,  if  he  were  here,  would 
be  to  be  Jefferson  over  again.     It  is  not  fair  to  Jefferson  for 


CROWD-MEN  553 

anybody  to  take  the  liberty  of  being  like  him,  when  he  would  not 
even  do  it  himself.  If  Jefferson  were  here,  he  would  break  away 
from  everybody,  lawyers,  statesmen  and  Congress  and  go  out- 
doors and  look  at  .1913  for  himself. 

I  like  to  imagine  how  it  would  strike  him.  I  am  not  troubled 
about  what  he  would  do.  Let  JeflFerson  go  out  and  listen  to 
that  vast  machine,  to  the  New  York  Central  Railway  smooth- 
ing out  and  roaring  down  crowds,  rolling  and  rolling  and  rolling 
men  all  day  and  all  night  into  machines.  Let  Jefferson  go  out 
and  face  the  New  York  Central  Railway!  JeflFerson  in  his 
time  had  not  faced  nor  looked  down  through  those  great  fissures 
or  chasms  of  ineflSciency  in  what  he  chose  to  call  democracy,  the 
haughty,  tryannical  aimlessness  and  meaninglessness  of  crowds, 
too  mean-spirited  and  full  of  fear  and  machines  to  dare  to  have 
leaders ! 

He  had  not  faced  that  blank  staring  hell  of  anonymousness, 
that  bottomless,  weak,  watery  muck  of  irresponsibility  —  that 
terrific,  devilish  vagueness  which  a  crowd  is  and  which  a  crowd 
has  to  be  without  leaders. 

JfeflFerson  did  not  know  about  or  reckon  with  Inventors,  as 
a  means  of  governing,  as  a  means  of  getting  the  will  of  the 
people. 

A  whole  new  age  of  invention,  of  creation,  has  flooded  the 
world  since  Jefferson.  This  is  the  main  fact  about  the  modem 
man,  that  he  is  gloriously  self-made.  He  is  practising  democracy, 
inventing  his  own  life,  making  his  own  soul  before  our  eyes. 

If  we  have  a  poet  in  the  White  House,  this  is  the  main  fact 
he  is  going  to  reckon  with:  He  will  not  be  seen  taking  sides 
with  the  Alexander  Hamilton  model  or  with  the  Thomas  Jeffer- 
son model  or  with  Karl  Marx  or  Emerson.  We  will  see  him 
taking  Karl  ]Marx  and  Emerson  and  Hamilton  and  JeflFerson  and 
melting  them  down,  glowing  them  and  fusing  them  together 
into  one  man  —  the  Crowd-Man  —  who  shall  be  more  aris- 
tocratic than  Hamilton  ever  dreamed,  and  be  filled  with  a 
genius  for  democracy  that  Jefferson  never  guessed. 


554  CROWDS 

America  to-day,  on  the  face  of  the  earth  and  in  the  hearts 
of  men,  is  a  new  democracy,  as  new  as  Radium,  Copernicus, 
the  Wireless  Telegraph,  as  new  and  just  beginning  to  be  noticed 
and  guessed  at  as  Jesus  Christ! 

Copernicus,  Marconi,  Wilbur  Wright,  and  Christianity  have 
turned  men's  hearts  outward.  Men  live  for  the  first  time  in 
a  wide  daily  consciousness  of  one  another, 

Alexander  Hamilton,  had  really  a  rather  timid  and  polite 
idea  of  what  an  aristocrat  was  and  Jefferson  had  merely  sketched 
out  a  ground  plan  for  a  democrat.  If  Hamilton  had  been  aris- 
tocratic in  the  modern  sense,  he  would  have  devoted  half  his 
career  to  expressing  a  man  like  Jefferson;  and  if  Jefferson  had 
been  more  of  a  democrat,  he  would  have  had  room  in  himself 
to  tuck  in  several  Alexander  Hamiltons.  Either  one  of  them 
would  have  been  a  Crowd-Man. 

By  a  Crowd-Man  I  do  not  mean  a  pull-and-haul  man,  a 
balance  of  equilibrium  between  these  two  men,  I  mean  a  fusion, 
a  glowed  together  interpenetration  of  them  both. 

They  did  not  either  of  them  believe  in  the  people  as  much  as  a 
man  made  out  of  both  of  them  would  —  a  really  wrought- 
through  aristocrat,  a  really  wrought-through  democrat  or 
Crowd-Man,  or  Hero  or  Saviour. 


I  am  afraid  that  some  of  us  do  not  Uke  the  word  Saviour  as 
people  think  we  ought  to.  There  seems  to  be  something  about 
the  way  many  people  use  the  word  Saviour  which  makes  it 
seem  as  if  it  had  been  dropped  off  over  the  edge  of  the  world  — 
of  a  real  world,  of  a  man's  world. 

I  do  not  believe  that  Christ  spent  five  minutes  in  His  whole 
life  in  feeling  like  a  Saviour.  He  would  have  felt  hurt  if  He  had 
found  any  one  saying  He  was  a  Saviour  in  the  tone  people  often 
use.  He  wanted  people  to  feel  as  if  they  were  like  Him.  And 
the  way  He  served  them  was  by  making  them  feel  that  they 
were. 


CROWD-MEN  555 

I  do  not  believe  that  Thomas  Jefferson,  if  he  were  here  to- 
day, would  object  to  a  hero,  or  aristocrat,  a  special  expert  or 
a  genius  in  expressing  crowds,  if  he  lived  and  wrought  in  this 
spirit. 

The  final  objection  that  people  commonly  make  to  heroes  or 
to  men  of  marked  and  special  vision  or  courage  is  that  they  are 
not  good  for  people,  because  people  put  them  on  pedestals  and 
worship  them.  They  look  up  at  them  wistfully.  And  then 
they  look  down  on  themselves. 

But  I  have  never  seen  a  hero  on  a  pedestal. 

It  is  only  the  Carlyle  kind  of  hero  who  could  ever  be  put  on  a 
pedestal,  or  who  would  stay  there  if  put  there. 

And  Carlyle  —  with  all  honour  be  it  said  —  never  quite  knew 
what  a  hero  was.  A  hero  is  either  a  gentleman,  or  a  philos- 
opher, or  an  inventor. 

The  gentleman  —  on  a  pedestal  —  feels  hurt  and  slips  down. 

The  philosopher  laughs. 

The  inventor  thinks  up  some  way  of  having  somebody  else 
get  up  —  so  that  it  will  not  reaUy  be  a  pedestal  at  all. 

I  agree  with  all  the  socialists'  objections  to  heroes,  if  they  mean 
by  a  hero  the  kind  of  man  that  Thomas  Carlyle,  with  all  his  little 
glorious  hells,  all  his  little  cold,  lonesome,  select  heavens,  his 
thunderclub  view  of  life,  and  his  Old  Testament  imagination, 
called  a  hero.  There  is  always  something  a  little  strained  and 
competitive  about  Carlyle's  heroes  as  he  conceives  them  — 
except  possibly  one  or  two. 

Being  a  hero  with  Carlyle  consisted  in  conquering  and  dis- 
placing other  heroes.  Even  if  you  were  a  poet,  being  a  hero 
consisted  in  a  kind  of  spiritual  standing  on  some  other  poet's 
neck.  According  to  Carlyle,  one  must  always  be  a  hero  against 
other  men.  Modem  heroism  consists  in  being  a  hero  with  other 
men.  The  hero  Against  comes  in  the  Twentieth  Century  to  be 
the  hero  With,  and  the  modem  hero  is  known,  not  by  cutting  his 
enemies  down,  but  by  his  absorbing  and  understanding  them. 
He  drinks  up  what  they  wish  they  could  do  into  what  he  does, 


556  CROWDS 

or  he  states  what  they  believe  better  than  they  can  state  it. 
Combination  or  cooperation  is  the  tremendous  heroism  of  our 
present  hfe. 

I  admit  that  I  would  be  afraid  of  Carlyle's  heroes  having 
pedestals.  They  have  already  —  many  of  them  —  done  a  good 
deal  of  harm  because  they  have  had  pedestals,  and  because  they 
would  not  get  down  from  them. 

But  mine  would. 

With  a  man  who  is  being  a  hero  by  cooperation,  getting 
down  is  part  of  the  heroism.  And  there  is  never  any  real  danger 
in  allowing  a  pedestal  for  a  real  hero.  He  never  has  time  to  sit 
on  it. 

One  sees  him  always  over  and  over  again  kicking  his  pedestal 
out  from  under  him  and  using  it  to  batter  a  world  with.  As 
the  world  does  not  take  to  enjoying  its  heroes'  pedestals  in  this 
way,  a  pedestal  is  quite  safe.  Most  people  feel  the  same  about 
a  hero's  halo.  They  prefer  to  have  him  wear  it  like  a  kind  of 
glare  around  his  head,  and  if  he  uses  it  as  a  searchlight  upon 
them,  if  he  makes  his  halo  really  practical  and  lights  up  the 
world  a  little  around  him  instead,  he  is  not  likely  to  be  spoiled, 
is  almost  always  safe  from  any  danger  of  having  any  more  halo 
crowded  upon  him  than  he  wants,  or  than  anybody  wants  him 
to  have.  One  might  put  it  down  as  a  motto  for  heroes,  "  Keep 
your  halo  busy  and  it  won't  hurt  you."  Modern  democracy 
will  never  have  a  chance  of  being  what  it  wants  to  be  as  long  as 
it  keeps  on  throwing  away  great  natural  forces  like  halos  and 
pedestals.  There  is  no  reason  why  we  should  not  believe  in 
halos  and  pedestals,  not  to  wear  or  stand  on,  but  when  used 
strictly  for  butting  and  seeing  purposes. 

We  may  know  a  real  hero  by  the  fact  that  we  always  have  to 
keep  rediscovering  him.  One  knows  the  real  hero  by  the  fact 
that  in  his  relation  to  people  who  put  him  on  a  pedestal  he  is 
always  kicking  his  pedestal  away  and  substituting  his  vision. 

There  is  something  about  any  real  heroism  that  we  see  to-day 
which  makes  heroes  out  of  the  people  who  see  it,     A  real  hero 


CROWD-MEN  557 

has  his  back  to  the  people  and  the  crowd  looks  over  his  shoulders 
with  him  at  his  work  and  he  feels  behind  him  daily,  with  joy  and 
strength,  thousands  of  heroes  pressing  up  to  take  his  place. 
And  he  is  daily  happy  with  a  strange,  mighty,  impersonal  joy 
in  all  these  other  people  who  could  do  it,  too.  He  lives  with  a 
great  hurrah  for  the  world  in  his  heart.  The  hero  he  worships 
is  the  hero  he  sees  in  others.  A  man  like  this  would  feel  cramped 
if  he  were  merely  being  himself , or  if  he  were  being  imprisoned  by 
the  people  in  his  own  glory,  or  were  being  cooped  up  into  a  hero. 

It  is  in  this  sense  that  I  have  finally  come  again  to  believe 
that  hero  worship  is  safe,  that  in  some  form  as  one  of  the  great 
elemental  energies  in  human  nature  it  must  be  saved,  that  it 
must  be  regulated  and  used,  that  it  has  an  incalculable  power 
which  was  meant  to  be  turned  on  to  run  a  nation  with. 

And  I  believe  that  Thomas  Jefferson,  confronted  in  this 
desperate,  sublime  1913,  with  the  new  socialized  spirit  of  our 
time,  placed  face  to  face  at  last  with  a  Christian  aristocrat  or 
Crowd-Man,  would  want  him  saved  and  emphasized  too. 

It  is  because  in  democracies  saviours  are  being  kept  by 
crowds  and  by  miUionaires  and  by  machines  very  largely  in 
the  position  of  hired  men,  or  of  ordered  about  men,  that  ninety- 
nine  one-hundredths  of  the  saving  or  of  the  man-inventing 
and  man-freeing  in  crowds,  is  not  being  attended  to. 

I  have  wanted  to  suggest  in  this  book  that  the  moment  the 
Saviours  in  any  nation  will  organize  quietly  and  save  them- 
selves first,  the  less  diflScult  thing  (with  men  to  attend  to  it) 
like  saving  the  rest  of  us,  will  be  a  mere  matter  of  detail. 

The  only  thing  that  stands  in  the  way  is  the  Thomas  Jefferson 
bug-a-boo.  People  seem  to  have  a  kind  of  left-over  fear  that  the 
moment  these  saviours  or  experts  or  inventors  or  heroes,  call 
them  what  you  will,  get  the  chance  that  they  have  been  working 
to  get  to  save  us,  they  will  not  want  to  use  it. 

It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  anything  will  be  allowed  to  inter- 
fere with  it  —  with  their  saving  us,  or  making  detailed  arrange- 
ments for  our  saving  ourselves. 


558  CROWDS 

Being  a  great  man  (if  as  democracies  seem  to  think  being 
a  great  man  is  a  disease )  is  at  least  a  self-limiting  disease. 
Inventors  when  they  get  their  first  chance  are  going  to  save  us, 
because  they  could  not  endure  living  with  us  unless  we  were 
saved. 

Inventors  could  not  enjoy  inventing  —  inventing  their 
greater,  more  noble  inventions,  until  they  had  attended  to  a 
httle  rudimentary  thing  in  the  world  like  having  people  half 
alive  on  it  to  live  with  and  to  invent  for. 

It  does  not  interest  a  really  inspired  man  —  inventing  flying 
machines  for  people  who  have  not  time  to  notice  the  sky, 
wireless  telegraph  for  people  who  have  nothing  to  say,  symph- 
onies for  tone-deaf  crowds,  or  ambrosia  for  people  who  prefer 
potatoes. 

This  is  the  whole  issue  in  a  nutshell.  When  people  say  that 
our  inventors,  or  Crowd-Men  or  saviours,  when  they  have  ful- 
filled or  saved  themselves,  cannot  be  trusted  to  save  us,  the 
reply  that  will  have  to  be  made  is  that  only  people  who  do  not 
know  how  inventors  feel  or  how  they  are  made  or  what  it  is  in 
them  that  drives  them  to  do  things,  or  how  they  do  them,  will 
be  afraid  to  let  men  who  give  us  worlds  and  who  express  worlds 
for  us  and  who  make  us  express  ourselves  in  worlds  the  freedom 
to  help  shape  them  and  run  them. 

]\Ien  who  have  the  automatic  courage,  the  helpless  bigness 
and  disinterestedness  that  always  goes  with  invention,  with 
creative  power,  can  be  trusted  by  crowds.     . 

The  prejudice  against  the  hero  is  due  to  the  fact  that  heroes 
in  days  gone  by  have  been  by  a  very  large  majority  fighters, 
expressing  themselves  against  the  world,  or  expressing  one 
part  of  the  woi^ld  against  another. 

The  moment  the  hero  becomes  the  artist  and  begins  expres- 
sing himself  and  expressing  the  crowd  together,  the  crowd  will 
no  longer  be  touched  with  fear  and  driven  back  upon  itself  by 
the  Thomas  JefiFerson  bug-a-boo. 


EPILOGUE 

FRANCE  is  threatened  by  her  childless  women,  Germany  by 
her  machines,  Russia  is  beginning  the  Nineteenth  Century. 

It  is  to  England  and  America,  struggling  still  sublimely  with 
their  sins,  the  nations  look' — for  the  time  being — for  the  next 
big  free  lift  upon  the  world. 

Looked  at  in  the  large,  in  their  historic  import  and  their 
effect  on  the  time,  the  English  temperament  and  the  American 
temperament  are  essentially  the  same.  As  between  ourselves, 
England  and  America  are  apt  to  seem  different,  but  as  between 
us  and  the  world,  we  blend  together.  One  could  go  through  in 
what  I  have  been  saying  about  Oxford  Street  and  the  House 
of  Commons  in  this  book,  strike  out  all  after  Oxford  Street  and 
read  Broadway,  and  all  after  the  House  of  Commons  and  read 
Congress,  and  it  would  be  essentially  true  with  the  necessary 
English  or  American  modulation.  In  the  same  way  it  would  be 
possible  to  go  through  and  strike  out  all  after  the  President  and 
read  Prime  Minister  or  the  Government. 

England  and  America  have  the  individualistic  temperament, 
and  if  we  cannot  make  a  self-expressive  individualism  noble, 
and  if  we  are  not  men  enough  to  sing  up  our  individualism  into 
the  social  and  the  universal,  we  perish. 

It  is  our  native  way.     We  are  to  be  crowdmen  or  nobodies. 

The  English  temperament  or  the  American  temperament, 
whichever  we  may  call  it,  is  the  same  tune,  but  played  with  a 
diflFerent  and  almost  contrasting  expression. 

England  is  being  played  gravely  and  massively  like  a 
violoncello,  and  America  —  played  more  lightly,  is  full  of 
the  sweeps  and  the  lulls,  the  ecstasy,  the  overriding  glory  of 
the  violins. 

599 


560  CROWDS 

But  it  is  the  same  tune,  and  God  helping  us,  we  will  not  and 
we  shall  not  be  overwhelmed  under  the  great  dome  of  the 
world,  by  Germany  with  all  her  faithful  pianolas,  or  by  France 
with  her  cold  sweet  flutes,  or  by  Russia  with  her  shrieks  and  her 
pauses,  pounding  her  splendid  kettledrums  in  that  awful 
silence ! 

Our  song  is  ours  — England  and  America,  the  'cello,  and  the 
bright  violins! 

And  no  one  shall  sing  it  for  us. 

And  no  one  shall  keep  us  from  singing  it. 

The  skyscrapers  are  singing,  "I  will,  I  will!"  to  God,  and 
Manchester  and  London  and  Port  Sunlight  are  singing,  "I  will, 
I  will!"  to  God.  I  have  heard  even  Westminister  Abbey  and 
York  —  those  beautiful  old  fellows — faltering,  "I  will,  I  will! 
to  God! 

And  I  have  seen,  as  I  was  going  by.  Trinity  Church  at  the 
head  of  Wall  Street  repenting  her  sins  and  holding  noonday 
prayer  meetings  for  millionaires. 

Our  genius  is  a  moral  genius,  the  genius  of  each  man  for  ful- 
filling himself.  Our  religion  is  the  finding  of  a  way  to  do  it 
beautifully. 

Let  Russian  men  be  an  army  if  they  like  —  death  and 
obedience.  Let  German  men  keep  on  with  their  faithful, 
plodding,  moral  machines  if  they  want  to,  and  let  all  French 
men  be  artists,  go  tra-la-laing  up  and  down  the  Time  to  the 
beautiful  —  furnishing  nudes,  clothes,  and  academies  to  a 
world. 

But  we  —  England  and  America  —  will  stand  up  on  this 
planet  in  the  way  we  like  to  stand  on  a  planet  and  sing,  "I  will, 
I  will!"  to  God. 

If  we  cannot  do  better,  we  will  sing,  "I  won't,  I  won't!" 
to  God.  Our  wills  and  our  won'ts  are  our  genius  among 
the  sons  of  men.  They  are  what  we  are  for.  With 
England  and  America  I  will  and  I  won't  are  an  art  form, 
cur   means   of   expressing  ourselves,    our  way  of    invention 


EPILOGUE  561 

and  'creation,  of  begetting  an  age,  of  begetting  a  nation  upon 
a  world. 

We  do  not  know  (like  great  men  and  children)  who  we  are  at 
first.     We  begin  saying  vaguely  —  will  —  will ! 

Then  i  will! 

Then  I  will! 

Then  WE  WILL! 

THE    BEGINNING. 


PUBLISHER'S  ANNOUNCEMENT 


I.     Index  and   Finder  for  "Crowds" 

II.     Experience    Meeting   of    Readers    of 
*' Crowds" 

III.    Books  by  the  Same  Author 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


ACHESON,  Edward  A.,  his  being 
got  to  be  good,  498;  his  oiling 
the  wheels  of  a  world,  499. 

Addams,  Jane,  and  technique  in  good- 
ness, 199. 

Advertising  and  lying,  109;  and 
newspaper  control,  112,  and  labour- 
problems,  3:30— 322;  and  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  United  States,  460-468; 
as  a  way  of  finding  what  people 
want,  506-510;  as  a  way  of  carrying 
through  ideas,  517-522;  as  a  way 
of  governing,  524-526. 

Aeroplanes  and  people  who  make  ob- 
jections, 85. 

Altruism,  trying  to  keep  from  being 
suspected  of  it,  528;  a  feeble  thing 
as  compared  with  mutualism,  52, 
529. 

America,  the  future  of,  the  solidity 
of,  69;  the  religion  of,  the  happiness 
of,  139-141;  its  typical  attitude 
toward  success,  164;  its  attitude 
toward  science  and  facts,  178; 
toward  moral  machinery,  £01;  to- 
ward speed,  203a;  toward  news- 
papers, 467;  toward  labour,  493; 
toward  trusts,  495;  Presidents, 
497-504;  Literature,  508;  toward 
Specialization,  508-509;  toward 
goodness,  533;  toward  price  of  oil, 
536;  toward  Business  scares,  537; 
toward  other  nations,  559. 

Arbitration-boards,  change  symptoms 
instead  of  curing  disease,  53. 

.\ristocracy  and  ideals,  303;  and  in- 
vention, 383-403;  and  business, 
404-409;  and  service,  323;  and 
saviours,  400. 

Art-forms,  and  machinery,  236-255; 
262-265;  and  democracy,  269-279. 


Artists,  organizers  and  hewers,  396- 

401. 
Average  Man,  world  belongs  to  him, 

291;     wants  people  he  is  not  yet 

equal  to,  293. 
Audiences,  and  Democracy,  21 ;  being 

in  a  small  one,  26;  and  artists,  288. 


B 


BALLINGER,  and  Taft,  473. 
Banker,  as  a  statesman,  320,  32 1 ; 

as  a  hired  man,  404-409. 
Biology,  and  economic  machine,  373; 

and    faith,    275;   and    being    born 

again  with  ninety  million  people  to 

help,    377. 
Bennett,  Arnold,  and  his  world,  8. 
Bessemer,   if   St.  Francis   were    like, 

188. 
Betting,  column  in  George  Cadbury's 

paper,  545. 
Bibby,  Joseph,  making  oil  cakes  and 

loyal  workmen  together,  518. 
Bible,  the  sublimest  attempt  to  an- 
swer the  question  "Where  are  we 

going.'"  10-16;     507-515. 
Bicycle  that  flies,  380. 
Booth-Tucker,  and  rats,  387. 
Boston   Gas   Company's   Soul,   with 

Mr.  Brandeis's  Compliments,  483, 

484. 
Boys,  three  boys  and  a  fish,  31 ;   boys 

and  girls  know  about  worlds,  32; 

their  openness,  532,  and  pennies  in 
•    the  Strand,   384;    very  good   little 

boys,  389. 
Brandeis,  Louis,  433,  434. 
Brangwyn,  Frank,  and  labour,  551. 
Brooklyn     Bridge,     and     democratic 

art,  277. 
Bryan,    William  J.,   and  Roosevelt, 

501. 


565 


566 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


Burbank,  Luther,  his  method  applied 
to  people  instead  of  to  chestnuts, 
63,  64. 

Business  is  not  business,  418. 

Butternut  Tree,  394. 


CABINET  A,  is  a  collection  of 
news    departments,    524-526. 

Cadbury,  George,  543-547. 

Capitalists,  Rockefeller,  77-79;  Car- 
negie, 205-210;  as  artists,  227- 
235;  Morgan,  307-312;  as  labour- 
ers, 422-430;  touching  imagination 
of  capitalists,  442-447,  454,  458- 
462,  476-477,  483-490;  capitalists 
touching  the  imagination  of  the 
government,  495-499. 

Carborundum,  499. 

Carlyle's  Heroes,  554-558. 

Carnegie,  Andrew,  his  attitude  to- 
ward people,  205-210;  if  he  would 
invest  in  brains,  not  in  books,  221- 
226. 

Cassatt,  502. 

Cathedrals,  an  offering  to  God,  3; 
will  they  bring  Man  to  me?  17; 
what  they  lack,  186-188;  in  an 
age  with  the  cathedral  mood,  276- 
277. 

Chesterton,  G.  K.,  8,  10. 

Christ  and  crowds,  29;  as  an  inventor 
of  people,  61;  as  a  judge  of  human 
nature,  76;  as  a  champion  of  this 
world,  155,  his  suppo.sed  meekness, 
162;  his  idea  of  martyrdom,  165; 
his  use  of  success  and  failure,  167- 
169;  his  use  of  men  who  do  things, 
170-172;  his  right  to  a  cross  not 
necessarily  ours,  177;  as  a  saviour 
for  New  York,  190-197;  as  a  ser- 
vant, 323-324;  as  an  individualist 
or  socialist,  336;  as  an  enemy,  343- 
345 ;  his  stand  for  being  like  people, 
400;  his  stand  for  their  being  like 
him,  554. 

Christmas  in  New  York,  190-197. 

Churches,  and  vagueness,  186-189; 
and  News,  200-201. 

Churchward,  34-35. 

Class-consciousness,  and  the  labour- 


ing man,  147-153;  and  the  average 
man,  304;  and  the  evolution  of 
hunger,  354-360. 

Columbus,  To  Christopher  Columbus, 
1;  understood  Wilbur  Wright,  01; 
led  by  the  invisible,  66. 

Commission  Government,  202. 

Committees,  283. 

Conservative,  his  mereness,  371. 

Consistency  Bugaboo,  543-547. 

Constitution,  American,  stands  for 
the  tableland,  279;  its  interpreta- 
tion by  the  President,  465. 

Conventions,  24,  25. 

Copartnership,   148-153. 

Cooperation,  and  facts,  339-345 ;  and 
desire,  536-538,  and  candor,  539, 
543;    and  heroes,  555-557. 

Copernicus,  66. 

Courage,  its  relation  to  incompetence, 
329;  three  stages  of,  332;  its  atti- 
tude toward  revolution,  337-338; 
its  sense  of  identity  with  enemies, 
339-342;  its  latest  way  of  fighting, 
343-345;  what  it  is  made  of;  346- 
347;  courage  and  hunger,  349-363; 
courage  for  others,  364-370;  cour- 
age and  brains,  404-405. 

Coward,  never  known  one,  346. 

Crowbars,  416. 

Crowds  and  the  Arts,  280-294. 

Crowd-Man,  identified,  14;  an  in- 
vention for  making  crowds  see, 
58-64;  his  possibilities,  86-90;  his 
beginnings,  332-345;  his  wealth, 
422-430;     his  point  of  view,  553- 


D 


DANTE,  looks  at  Beatrice,  379. 
David,  his  patriotism,  157,  158, 
159;  poet,  king,  and  soldier,  396; 
keeping  the  seventh  command- 
ment, 455;  singing  the  news,  515. 
Democracy,  and  tra  la  la,  18;  the 
moral  theory  of,  76;  and  Art,  269- 
279;  and  Personality,  280-294; 
and  Business,  390-409;  and  Jeffer- 
son, 552;  and  Great  Men,  553-558; 
and  Bugaboos,  534;  and  News,  536- 
543;  and  Service.  323. 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


567 


Department  Stores,  and  advertise- 
ments, 109,  112;  touching  the 
imagination  of  crowds,  129-141; 
politeness  in,  181-182;  goodness 
in,  184;  Oxford  Street  hums.  The 
House  hems,  440-448.  Filenes, 
199,  502. 

Derricks,  and  poets,  511. 

Direct  Action,  Business  controlling 
business,  431-439;  Employees  con- 
trolling business,  442;  Consumers 
controlling  business,  445. 

Dockers,  their  being  hungry,  349- 
355;  their  not  being  hungry  enough, 
356-363. 

Durbar,  236-237. 

Durer,  Albert,  169. 


E 


ECONOMIC  Machine,  372,  373. 
Edison,  Thomas  A.,  a  man   who 

says  how,  192;   toeing  a  line,  498. 
Education,  26. 
Elephants,  236-239. 
Efficiency,  See  "Go,"  "Success." 
Elisha,   313. 

Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo,  552,  553. 
Employer,   stupendous,  monotonous, 

successful,  142-145;  to  stop  getting 

in  the  way,  281. 
England     and     .\merica,    expressing 

their    characters,  491;    singing  "I 

will!"  to  God,  559-561. 


FACTORIES,  the  machine  scare, 
34-48;  the  man  says  how  and 
the  machine  starts,  186-203J;  iron 
machines,  236-279. 

Fear,  and  cliques,  325;  and  strikes, 
326;  and  wearine-ss,  332;  and  la- 
bour, 329,  330;  and  class,  334; 
and  revolution,  337;  and  the 
scientific  spirit,  339;  and  war,  343- 
847. 

Ferguson,  Charles,  510. 

Filene,  says  how,  199;  makes  a  city 
into  a  Store,  502;  and  the  right  to 
be  "inconsistent,"  547. 

Fleet  Street,  3-5. 


Flying  Machines,  and  new  worlds, 
383;  and  American  character,  60; 
and  cities,  62;   and  Thought,  88. 

Franklin,  66. 


G 


GALSWORTHY,  J.,  and  photo- 
graphing things,  8;  and  not 
wanting  things,  12. 

Galveston,  202. 

Genius  for  Being  Believed  in,  53- 
54. 

"Go,"  what  it  believes,  62;  what  it 
is  made  of,  106;  how  it  works,  108, 
110;  how  crowds  encourage  it,  114; 
and  getting  one's  own  attention, 
117;  and  news  about  people,  320- 
322;  and  news  about  one's  self, 
413-421. 

Goethals,  Col.,  499. 

Golden  Rule,  101. 

Goodness,  and  hurrying,  76;  defined, 
79;  the  trouble  with  it,  103;  the 
people  mixed  up  with  it,  104;  the 
people  who  have  a  right  to  it,  105; 
how  one  knows  it,  106;  how  one 
learns  it,  107-109;  a  by-product, 
114;  otheV  people's,  116-124;  and 
my  plumber,  125;  and  imagination 
of  crowds,  128-141;  and  labour, 
142-153;  and  profits,  154-162;  and 
Crosses,  163-178;  and  facts,  178- 
183;  and  crowds,  184;  and  science, 
.186-189;  and  machinery,  196-203. 

Goody-good  Bugaboo,  536-547. 

Glass-house,  532. 

Great  Western  Railway,  241. 

Grey,  Lord,  addresses  a  meeting,  577; 
what  he  knows  about  copartner- 
ship, 520;  what  he  knows  about 
employers,  521;  what  he  and 
Frederick  Taylor's  workmen  know, 
522. 

Gore,  Bishop,  334,  336. 


H 


HAMILTON,  Alexander,  552-554. 
Hand-labour      and      Machine- 
labour,  262-265. 
Hand-made  World,  36-37. 


568 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


Hartshorn,  Vernon,  his  speech,  349; 
people  educated  by,  545. 

Hat,  gray,  133-135. 

Haywood,  Bill,  America's  Tom  Mann, 
313,  317. 

Hem  and  Haw,  438, 

Hendon,  383. 

Heroes,  297-342;  as  spy-glasses,  305; 
and  self-will,  331-336;  and  \ision, 
337-342;  and  Revolution,  237; 
and  Saviours,  400-401,  554;  defini- 
tion of,  342;  rules  for  telling  one, 
343-348;  and  Christ,  554;  and 
Carlyle,  555. 

Hewers,  Organizers  and  artists,  33C- 
401. 

High  Prices  and  Half  Work,  492-494. 

Hill,  James  J.,  70. 

History,  losing  its  monopoly,  72;  as 
a  habit  of  mind,  203;  as  a  point 
of  departure,  380-382. 

Homer.  198. 

Homer,  Winslow,  551. 

Honesty,  the  best  policy,  its  failure 
as  a  motive,  154;  its  success  as  a 
belief,   155-159. 

Hotels,  275-276. 

House  of  Commons  and  Oxford  Street, 
431. 

Hurry,  and  character,  76;  and  busi- 
ness, 459. 

Hush !  one  set  of  people  always  saying, 
467;  the  ragtime  tune  of  business, 
530;    the  President  saying,  552. 


I  from  page  1  to  561. 
i,  pages  534-535. 

Ideals,  realizable  ideals,  11-16;  news 
and  labour,  413-430;  news-books, 
510-516. 

Imagination  of  crowds,  65 ;  of  unseen, 
66-68;  of  future,  69-73;  about 
people,  74,  87. 

Improving  People,  democratic  theory 
of,  76-81;  in  crowds,  114-201; 
through  news,  work,  money,  and 
government,  413-448;  through 
news-men.  Presidents,  books,  ma- 
chines, and  crowds,  476-561  ;  not  im- 
proving anybody  in  this  book,  534. 


Incompetence,  53. 

Individualism,  and  socialism,  335; 
and  Christ's  dying  for  it,  336. 

Industrial  Workers  of  the  World  (or 
Syndicalism),  Pounding  or  seeing, 
50-57;  new  kinds  and  new  sizes 
of  employers,  03-64;  touching  the 
imagination  of  labour,  142-153; 
seeing  through  millionaires,  228- 
230;  keeping  millionaires  humble, 
232-235;  short-hours  and  skilled 
labour,  262-265;  Tom  Mann  and 
Haywood,  305-330;  lazy  revo- 
lutions, 338;  courage,  339-341; 
slovenly  fighting,  343-348;  want- 
ing things,  349-355;  getting  things, 
356-363;  using  people  who  disagree, 
364-370;  explosives,  371;  possibili- 
ties, 380;  selecting  leaders,  394- 
396;  standing  by,  400-401;  keep- 
ing owners,  under,  403-409;  getting 
a  chance,  413-421;  high  cost  of 
living,   492-494. 

Invention,  the  machine  scare,  36-48; 
the  man  says  how  and  the  ma- 
chine starts,  186-203rf. 

Inventors,  380-409. 


JEFFERSON,  Thomas,  as  a  buga- 
boo, 534;  as  an  imitation  of  him- 
self, 552-554. 
Johnson,  Tom,  as  news  to  a  President, 
477;  helping  a  nation  to  express 
itself,  547. 


K 


KIPLING,  Rudyard,  what  he 
thinks  beasts  and  soldiers  are 
for,  208-209;  and  Allen  Upward, 
213-216;  representative  of  a 
crowded  age,  270-271. 


LABOUR  Unions,  47;  touching 
imagination  of,  147-153;  253- 
255;  right  to  news  about  how 
cooperation  works,  321-322;  and 
class    consciousness,     317;        and 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


569 


courage,  346-348;  see  also  In- 
dustrial Workers  of  World. 

Leonardo,   9. 

Lever,  Sir  William,  422. 

Liar,  The,  107-113. 

Libraries,  Carnegie  and  his  libraries, 
20i5-210;  paper  books  and  wooden 
boys,  221-226. 

"Life,"  505. 

Lim,  making  over  the  earth,  93-94; 
as  a  business  angel,  104-106. 

Lincoln,  Emancipating  the  people, 
91;  Emancipated  by  the  people, 
377 ;  the  people  say  "  Who  are  we.* "' 
475. 

Literature,  National.  Wanted  a  great 
living  American  author,  221 ;  news- 
books,  505-516. 

Listening,  and  reform,  369. 

Livesey,  Sir  George,  his  courage  for 
his  workmen,  340. 

London,  Bishop  of,  188. 

Look!  462-468. 

Louvre,   146. 


M 


MC  ADOO,  498. 
Mac  Ewen,  Davy,  A  Traitor? 
331;  A  me-man?  334. 
Machinery,  and  fear  of  civilization, 
34-48;  and  conscience,  23;  and 
imagination,  58-62;  and  new  ideas, 
201-203;  ard  motor  power  in  men, 
203a;  for  rewarding  literature, 
211-220;  for  creating  great  men 
out  of  books,  221-226;  and 
theatres,  233;  and  elephants,  236; 
and  Oxford  gentlemen,  240;  and 
brain  cells,  243;  and  self-expression, 
245-247;  and  machine  trainers, 
249;  and  mechanical  people,  250; 
and  employers  and  workmen,  252; 
the  subconscious  mind  of  the  world, 
256-261 ;  and  short  hours,  262;  and 
self-assertion,  266-268;  democracy 
and  art,  269-279;  and  beauty,  280; 
and  individualism,  283-287;  and 
hysterics,  288;  and  the  average 
man,  290-294;  the  Whirling  Un- 
belief, 371-374;  and  counting, 
380-382;    and  religion.   387:    and 


ideals,  419;  and  over  specialization, 
508;  and  organizing  attention  of  a 
world,  518-526;  and  the  Crowd- 
Man,   553. 

Mac  Rae,  Hugh,  547. 

Mann,  Tom,  as  a  spy-glass,  305; 
makes  a  speech,  313;  and  the  Lady- 
Like  Person,  316;  and  knocking 
people  down,  317;  his  class- 
syndicalism  vs.  crowd  syndicalism, 
318-319;  and  the  three  gears  of 
courage,  334;  backs  down  and 
fights,  327-330. 

Marconi,  204. 

Marx,  Karl,  453,  553. 

McAdoo,  William  G.,  498-504. 

Mechanical  Arts,  275. 

Me-man,  and  other  Me-Men,  304; 
his  evolution  into  the  Classman  and 
Crowd-man,  147-153;  his  hunger- 
ing for  things,  349-355;  his  getting 
things,  356-361. 

Metropolitan   Tower,    139-141. 

Middleman,  537,  538. 

Millet,  551. 

Millionaires,  the  factory  and  the 
theatre,  227-235;  men  who  are 
not  afraid,  404-409;  news  and 
money,  422-430;  newspapers,  517- 
523. 

Mince  Pie,  453. 

Modesty    Bugaboo,    527-543. 

Morgan,  Pierpont,  as  a  crowd  spy- 
glass, 305 ;  his  vision  for  the  world, 
307-309;  his  blow  on  the  world, 
310;  and  the  next  Morgan,  311-312, 
320,  321. 

Moses,  449-460. 

Motives,  Sliding  Scale  of,  seeing 
farther  than  other  people  do,  82; 
the  successful,  146-153. 

Motor  Car,  and  morals,  198-199. 


N 


NAZARETH,    spending    some    of 
one's  time  there,  381-382. 
News,      power     based     on,     70-73; 
churches  are  for  news,   194;     and 
the  Presi<lent  and  the  people,  466- 
482;    I  am  the  news!    538-543. 
Newspapers,  the  crowdscare,  27-28; 


570 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


bullying  the  newspapers,  112; 
newspapers  that  say  "Hush!  "  466; 
the  President  says  "Look!"  466- 
468;  and  news  machines,  517- 
526;  George  Cadbury's  newspaper, 
545. 

New  York,  America's  religion,  139- 
141;  Christmas  in  New  York,  190- 
197;  the  inconvenience  of  being 
human,   286-289. 

New  York  Central  Railway,  553. 

Noah,  383. 

Nobel  Prize,  221-226. 

Non-Gregarious,  goodness  and  efR- 
ciency,  96-102;  his  goodness,  164- 
165;  "^too  good  to  be  true,  527-528. 

0 

OBJECTIONS,  85. 
Optimism,  86,  87. 
Organizers,  396-401. 
Oxford,  240-242. 


PADEREWSKI,  288. 
Parallel  columns,  547. 

Parthenon,  275. 

Pennies,  and  good  little  boys,  384- 
387,  398. 

Pessimism,  86,  87,  178,  186. 

Pethick-Lawrence,  Mrs.,  and  her 
nice  little  jail,  313. 

Pinchot,  477. 

Plumber,  a  genius,  95;  making  good- 
ness hurry,  125-127. 

Portland  Cement,  and  conservatism, 
371. 

Preachers,  and  crowds,  21;  three 
kinds,  118;  being  improved  by, 
119-124;  their  news,  200-201-, 
their  vagueness,  200-203. 

President,  The,  his  getting  people 
to  be  good,  449-454;  his  tone,  455- 
456;  his  power  of  being  specific, 
457-462;  his  advertising  the  people, 
463;  his  power  of  selecting  news, 
465-468;  his  power  of  being  news 
himself,  469-471;  his  power  of 
making  other  men  news,  472;  his 
ways  of  getting  the  news,  474-482; 


his  being  a  shrewd  poet  about  the 

people,     383-504;     his    needing   a 

book    to    express    him,     513-516; 

Fourth  of  March,  550-554. 
Printing  press,   art   and  democracy, 

271;  and    city   government,    201- 

202. 
Privilege,  basis  of  a  true  government, 

486-488;  for  machines  of  men,  494- 

495. 
Prophets,  70-73. 
Psychology,  and  reform,  368. 
Public,  The,  a  dear  Old  Lady-Like 

Person,   315. 
Public  Service  Corporation,  89. 
Purple  Hats  and  Hard  Work,  413. 


R 


RADICAL,  his  being  afraid. 
Rats,  387. 

Reformers,  534-549. 

Religion  and  Money,  427-430. 

Revolution,  out  of  date  way  of  getting 
things,  337;  scared,  339,  unscien- 
tific, 3.39;  based  on  stupidity  about 
human  nature,  340. 

Ripley,  Edward  A.,  499. 

Rockefeller,  his  imagination,  78-79; 
his  cooperating  with  his  competi- 
tors, 83. 

Roosevelt,  a  news-man,  477-482;  an 
American  poet,  500-502;  his  news- 
sense,    533. 

Ruskin,  41. 


SAVIOURS,  what  they  are  not 
like,  400-401;  what  they  can 
do,  402-409. 

Scabs,  331,  334. 

Scares,  about  Crowds,  19-33;  about 
Machines,  34-48;  about  Power, 
537-538. 

Scientific  Method,  186-194. 

Self  ridge,  H.  Gordon,  133-135. 

Self  Will,  and  the  English  Tempera- 
ment, 334;  and  the  career  of  Christ, 
336. 

Seventh  Commandment,  455. 

Shaw,  Bernard,  throwing  stones,  8; 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


571 


if  he  had  told  what  kind  of  a  world 
I  w^ant,  10;  if  he  had  told  what  he 
wanted,  1 1 ;  his  attic  of  not-things, 
12. 

Shoemakers,  one  who  would  help 
most  ministers,  126;  one  who  needs 
news,  508. 

Shopping,  like  going  to  church,  128- 
l4l;  like  going  to  the  polls,  445- 
448. 

Shop-Windows,  and  morals,  80;  and 
newspapers,  113. 

Skyscrapers,  and  Democracy,  274; 
and  Art,  274;  saying  "Who  are 
you?"  286;  singing  "I  will"  tp 
God,  503,  504;  and  American 
literature,   511. 

Socialists,  and  their  literature,  15; 
and  their  philosophy,  22-23;  and 
their  judgments  of  human  nature, 
76-79;  and  levelling  down,  291- 
294;  and  their  fear  of  heroes,  297- 
302;  and  their  fear  of  words  and 
pictures,  303-306;  and  Pierpont 
Morgan,  309;  and  class-conscious- 
ness, 335-336;  and  Revolution,  337; 
and  Inventors,  390-396;  and  Per- 
sonality, 397-399;  self-respect, 
400-401;  and  their  not  reckoning 
with  ideals,  420-421;  and  com- 
petent capital,  422-430;  and  their 
way  of  getting  things  for  the  people, 
431-440;  and  the  people's  way  of 
getting  things  for  themselves,  440- 
448:  and  getting  business  men  to 
be  good,  453;  and  the  American 
temperament,  485-492,  493-495; 
and  Education,  505-510,  513-515; 
and  sterilized  business,  536-537; 
and  news,  539-542;  and  oppor- 
tunism, 544-549;  and  the  new  hero, 
554-556;  in  England  and  America, 
559. 

Sorting  people  out  to  die,  390-396; 
to  work,  402-409. 

Soul  of  a  Corporation,  the  Public 
Service  Corporation  that  worked, 
89;  and  soul  of  a  government,  489, 
490. 

Spending  One's  Money  as  a  Religion, 
445-448. 

Standard  Oil  Trust,  506,  507. 


Standing  up  for  the  World,  156-162. 

Steel  Trust,  430. 

Steinway  Piano,  451. 

Sterilized  Business,  537. 

Stewart,  A.  T..  his  invention  of  one 
price,  129-133;  his  forming  ^be 
character  of  ninety  million  people, 
130-133. 

StriKis,  49-57. 

Sub-con.scious  Mind  and  Machinery, 
256-261. 

Success,  based  on  knowing  what  one 
wants,' 15;  the  science  of  moving 
crowds,  25-30;  science  of  being 
believed  in,  55;  the  science  of 
expectation,  62;  science  of  seeing 
first,  69-73;  and  long  motives,  82, 
189;  and  imagination  about  people, 
83;  and  being  like  one's  self,  99; 
and  not  cheating  one's  self,  107- 
179;  and  reputation  of  the  world, 
154;  wins  success,  164-175;  and 
use  of  machinery,  256. 

Sugar  Trust,  429. 

Sunlight  Soap  Co.,  436,  560. 

Sun,  New  York,  178-181. 

Syndicalism,  See  Labour  Unions  and 
Industrial  Workers  of  the  World. 


TAFT,    Ex-President,  his  idea  of 
breathing,   472-473;    his  idea  of 

Roosevelt. 
Taylor,  Frederick,  and  Christ,   168- 

172;    and  Tom   Mann,   322;    what 

he  knows,  520-522. 
Taylor,  T.  C.  518. 
Teasing  People,  vs.  taking  goodness 

calmly,  84;    j)rcachers  teasing  peo- 
ple to  do  right,  118-120. 
Technique,  186-190,  196-200. 
Telegraph  Wires,  550. 
Telephone,  and  brains,  243;    one  was 

enough,  382. 
Temperament  and  Government,  483- 

504. 
Theatres,  230-235. 
Three  R's  of  Business,  424. 
-Thomas,  D.  A.,  expresses  for  Capital 

its  fear,  330;   and   its   IneflBciency, 

334. 


572 


INDEX  AND  FINDER 


Tillet,  Ben,  the  men  who  want  things 
and  the  men  who  get  things,  349- 
363;  a  would-be  friend  of  the 
people,  545. 

Titanic,  women  with  child  and  men 
with  ideas,  390-396. 

Toleration,  Dockers,  349-363;  peli- 
cans Upton  Sinclair  and  Ella 
Wheeler  Wilcox,  364-370;  Contem- 
porary Inconsistent  people,  543-547. 

Trafalgar  Square,  its  roar,  6-7;  its 
bewilderment  of  faces,  9. 

Trains,  achieving  the  impossible,  67; 
the  swing  and  rhythm  of  a  great 
creed,  203-204;  for  the  spirit  of 
man  and  for  the  will  of  God,  241- 
242;  carrying  green  fields  to  Lon- 
don, 242-244. 

Traitor  to  one's  class,  331;  Davy 
MacEwen,  331,  335;  Sir  Arthur 
Markham,  331 ;  Bishop  Gore,  323, 
333. 

Trusts,  in  the  hands  of  strong  men, 
44;  and  cooperation,  83;  and 
guessing  wrong,  108;  and  prospects 
of  the  bully.  111;  Pierpont  Morgan, 
308;  the  President  says  Yes  and 
No  to,  455-464;  and  American 
temperament,  483-504;  and  raising 
the  price  of  men,  506-507,  536. 

V 

UPWARD,  Allen,  212-220. 
U'ren,  84. 


VAIL,    Theodore   N.,   Telephone- 
Vail,  396;     Moses  and  Vail,  497. 
Van  Dyke,  Henry,  188. 


W 


WAGNER,    Richard,    as  an  in- 
ventor of  democracy  in  art, 

272. 
Walsh,  Stephen,  331. 
Wedgwood,  Josiah,  and  "Traitor  to 

one's  Class,"  331,   334. 
Wells,  H.  G.,  retorts  and  experiments, 

8;      his  rich,   bottomless   murk  of 

humanity,     12;        the    future    of 

America,  69. 
Whirling  Unbelief,  372-373. 
Whitman,  Walt,  296. 
Who  are  you.''  the  people  say,  469- 

475;    and  who  are  we?   538-543. 
Wilson,  President,  449-561. 


«<  VES,  but,"  483. 


Y 


ZANGWILL  and    his   millionaires 
before  and  after  taking,  227. 
Zoo,  364. 


AN 

EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS 

WINDY  BOSH:"  "Crowds"  is  a  forbidding  tome  of 
561  closely  printed  pages,  in  which  the  author  re- 
cords a  vast  mass  of  incoherent  and  banal  reflections 
upon  the  general  subject  of  democratic  society.  He  is  always 
giving  warning  that  something  sagacious  and  revolutionary  is 
<ioming,  but  it  is  always  lost  in  transit. 

.  .  .  And  so  on  and  so  on,  for  page  after  page  and  chapter 
after  chapter  —  a  veritable  avalanche  of  vague,  New  Thoughty 
rumble-bumble. 

.  .  ,  Thousands  of  well-meaning  but  unreflective  persons, 
plowing  through  "Crowds"  laboriously,  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  it  is  highly  profound.  But  its  actual  intellectual  content 
is  often  but  little  above  that  of  a  second-rate  college  yell. 
.     .     .  —  Baltimore  Sun. 

.  .  .  An  agitating  and  memorable  book,  filled  with  live 
formulas  and  arrowy  truths.     .     .  —  T.  P.'s  Weekly  (London) . 

The  most  religious  book  published  in  this  country  since  Uncle 
Tom's  Cabin  —  Life. 

Mr.  Lee  has  done  in  this  book  something  comparable  to  what 
Kipling  did  in  the  Nineties,  when  he  made  us  see  the  romance  of 
steam,  and  the  loyalties  and  codes  of  soldiers  and  department 
officials.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  helps  us  to  see  the  romance  of 
business,  and  the  codes  and  loyalties  which  bind  together  the 
great  industrial  fabrics. 

Like  Kipling,  he  is  a  poet;  but  he  is  a  prose-poet,  which  makes 
him,  when  he  is  not  eloquent,  a  little  absurd.  —  Chicago  Even- 
ing Post. 

673 


574  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

The  writer  is  built  on  a  big  scale,  like  his  own  America.  He 
is,  in  fact,  the  very  spirit  of  America,  in  its  dash,  its  boisterous 
hopefulness,  its  sublime  audacities.  Entirely  American  is  his 
dealing  with  personalities.  The  notabilities  of  the  States  and 
of  England  are  handled  with  an  amazing  frankness.     .     . 

Mr.  Lee's  idea  of  the  superman  is  set  out  with  a  force,  an 
originality,  a  sense  of  the  real  inwardness  of  things,  as  compared 
with  their  mere  outwardness,  which  is  genius.  ...  — 
Christian  World  (London). 

As  much  a  distillation  of  genius  as  anything  Carlyle  or  Ruskin 
or  Goethe  ever  wrote. 

Most  generations  have  had  to  die  before  anybody  could 
understand  them.  But  this  generation  is  more  fortunate.  It 
is  able  to  understand  itself  because  a  few  great  souls  have  given 
it  books  to  understand  itself  with. 

An  age  which  has  such  books  as  "Crowds"  and  "Leaves  of 
Grass"  written  about  it,  in  which  to  know  itself,  has  not  the  ex- 
cuse of  other  ages  for  blundering  off  into  the  tomb,  disgraced, 
defeated,  and  ashamed. 

In  "Crowds"  the  present  generation  becomes  conscious  of 
itself,  and  its  most  liberal  energies  will  find  release. 

Lee  may  have  the  vision  of  a  Wordsworth,  the  mental 
strength  of  a  Kelvin,  the  spirit  of  Jesus,  and  the  aloofness  of  a 
Landor,  but  he  has  made  himself  a  child  of  his  own  time,  entered 
down  into  the  depths  of  his  own  era,  shouldered  its  blunders  and 
stupidities  and  sins  upon  himself;  has  wrestled  with  it,  struggled 
with  it,  mastered  it,  and  has  now  emerged  with  it  purified, 
glorified,  translated,  and  done  into  a  book  —  Richmond  Pal- 
ladium. 

When  greatness  comes  your  way  do  you  flatter  yourself  that 
you  know  it  and  at  once  take  your  hat  off?  .  .  .  Here  is 
that  precious  thing,  a  new  thought  and  a  new  word;  here  is  a 
man  daring  to  be  himself,  and  daring,  moreover,  to  talk  un- 
feignedly  from  his  soul  and  tell  us  the  truth  as  it  appears  to  him, 
without  bothering  at  all  whether  any  one  else  ever  had  similar 
thoughts  or  feelings  since  Noah  slipped  moorings  and  made  for 
Ararat.  —  Richard  Burton  in  the  Bellman. 

If  a  man  cannot  sing,  Mr.  Lee  says,  let  the  man  keep  silence: 
'only  men  who  are  singing  things  shall  do  them.'     .     .     .     But 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  575 

Mr.  Lee  is  all  for  the  singers,  and  he  sings  himself  and  many 
other  things.  He  sings  loud  and  soulfully,  ore  rotundo;  550 
pages  of  song,  a  jumble  of  models  from  Ecclesiasticus,  Carlyle, 
Whitman.     His  song  of  the  skyscrapers :     .     .     . 

Such  stuff  defies  comment;  you  like  it  or  you  don't.  If  you 
like  it,  you  are  labelled  and  had  better  keep  still  about  it  in 
thoughtful  company.  It  is  in  bad  taste,  because  it  is  not  sin- 
cere. —  New  York  Sun. 

It  is  by  its  angle,  and  its  emphasis,  and  by  the  sort  of  future 
it  suggests,  that  Mr.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee's  readers  will  judge  the 
message  which  he  delivers  with  such  volcanic  sincerity  in  these 
pages.  —  Morning  Post  (London). 

Mr.  Lee  is  likened  sometimes  to  Emerson,  sometimes  to  Car- 
lyle, and  with  respect  to  the  tax  he  puts  on  imagination  there 
is  a  likeness  in  both  cases.  But  there  is  also  a  faint  curious 
trace  of  a  third  writer,  oddly  different  from  either,  Oscar  W  ilde, 
which  serves  to  unite  him  to  our  own  time,  but  adds  to  the  com- 
plexity of  the  formula.  That  he  is  as  sincere  as  the  older  writers 
we  need  not  question,  but  his  sincerity  takes  a  different  form : 
it  has  not  the  simple  earnestness  of  the  day  of  Carlyle  and  Emer- 
son,—  preaching  has  become  a  far  more  difficult  thing  in  our 
sophisticated  time,  and  a  preacher  is  not  allowed  to  take  himself 
too  seriously.  —  Springfield  Republican . 

The  book  has  clutch  to  it  —  no  mistaking  that.  The  pas- 
sionate sincerity  of  it  is  something  you  cannot  evade.  Every 
page  is  peppered  with  good  things,  things  divinatory,  wonderful 
generalizations,  startling  particularizations.  —  St.  Louis  Mirror. 

The  note  that  Whitman  struck  when  he  was  most  patriotic 
and  aroused,  or  that  Edward  Carpenter  achieves  when  he  is  at 
his  best,  is  the  one  which  Mr.  Lee,  by  some  miracle,  holds 
throughout  the  book.  Not  that  he  is  equally  felicitous  through- 
out 560  pages,  or  expects  the  vibrations  of  his  readers  to  remain 
undiminished  for  so  great  a  length  of  time  as  that  required  for 
the  reading  of  his  volume,  but  that,  having  seen  a  vision,  he  is 
able  to  retain  it  in  his  soul's  eye  and  to  interpret  its  meanings 
with  spontaneous  and  impassioned  eloquence.  ...  —  Chi- 
cago Tribune 


576  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

"But  Tell  Me  What  'Tis  All  About,  Quoth  Little  Peterkin?" 

I  have  failed  to  make  much  headway  in  my  attempt  to  read 
"Crowds."  So  far  as  I  can  make  head  or  tail  of  it,  the  whole 
book  is  a  sententious  discussion  of  the  self-propounded  question: 

' '  Aldelorontuphoscophornis . 

Where  left  you  Chrononhotonthologos?" 

Certainly  Mr.  Lee's  book  is  a  trifle  obscure.  Those  grappling 
with  it  must  be  prepared  to  immerse  their  cogitative  faculties 
in  cogibundity  of  cogitation.  —  Story  Book. 

"Crowds"  consists  of  six  hundred  pages  of  hustled  philosophy, 
and  the  reader  must  be  in  the  best  of  mental  condition  to  keep 
up  with  its  pace.     .     .     .      — Melbourne  Victoria  (Australia). 

.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee's  book  is  full  of  "wild  seraphic 
fire"  —  it  burns  and  toils  and  intensifies  itself  through  all  its 
maze  of  books,  parts,  and  chapters.  It  is  rather  a  prose-poem 
than  an  argument,  or  it  is  an  argument  conducted  on  the  plane 
of  vision  and  prophecy. 

.  .  .  This  is  a  new  book  in  the  sense  that  it  is  unlike  any 
other  modern;  a  big  book  because  it  deals  with  an  immense  sub- 
ject in  a  great  brave  way;  a  problem  that  has  bafiled,  appalled, 
and  even  overthrown  gigantic  intellects  in  all  ages.  —  Dundee 
Advertiser. 

A  fat  volume  of  some  six  hundred  pages,  filled  to  the  brim 
with  vague  windymush.  The  rev.  gent.  —  he  is,  I  believe,  in 
holy  orders  —  performs  in  the  best  sacerdotal  manner.  That 
is  to  say,  he  clothes  commonplace  and  often  downright  silly 
thoughts  in  ornate  and  stuffy  garments,  and  so  gives  them  a 
false  air  of  importance.  He  is  always  announcing  the  obvious 
in  terms  of  the  revolutionary,  and  with  all  the  typographical 
trappings  of  a  blood-tub  dime  novel. 

We  hear  about  the  Economic  Machine,  Whirling  Unbelief, 
the  Sidewalk  of  Truth,  the  Golden  Rule  Before  and  After  Tak- 
ing, the  Meat  Trust,  the  Blackness,  the  Lonely  Hunger,  and  all 
the  other  familiar  scarecrows  and  hobgoblins  of  the  Uplift.  The 
author  describes  for  us,  with  great  particularity,  just  where  and 
when  this  or  that  Great  Thought  was  hatched  in  him  —  how  he 
sat  on  a  bench  in  the  zoo  at  Regent's  Park  on  a  day  in  1911  and 
achieved  the  staggering  idea  that  "possibly  people  are  as  dif- 
ferent from  one  another  inside,  in  their  souls  at  least,  as  dif- 


OP  READERS  OF  CROWDS  577 

ferent  as  these  animals  are";  how  he  once  walked  down  Fleet 
Street  to  Ludgate  Hill  and  was  flabbergasted  by  the  sudden 
riddle  "Where  are  we  going?"  And  toward  the  end,  he  an- 
nounces the  greatest  discovery  of  all,  to  wit :     .     .     . 

Well,  well,  don't  laugh  too  soon!  The  odds  are  that  ,  .  . 
"  Crowds"  will  have  a  large  sale  in  our  fair  republic. 

.  The  way  to  get  a  reputation  for  sagacity  is  to  trans- 
late platitudes  into  mystical  rumble-bumble.  That  exhorter 
whose  meaning  is  plain  at  first  hearing,  that  propagandist  who 
thinks  his  thoughts  out  clearly  and  puts  them  into  sound  and 
simple  English,  has  a  hard  time  catching  the  crowd.  The  taste 
of  the  moment  is  for  more  subtle  and  puzzling  stuff  —  for  non- 
sensical gabble  about  Avatars,  Oversouls  and  Zeitgeists,  for 
copybook  maxims  with  their  eyebrows  penciled  and  feathers 
stuck  in  their  hats,  for  long  rows  of  meaningless  italics  and  capi- 
tals, for  mellow,  Maeterlinckian  cadenzas  on  penny  whistles, 
and  the  platitudinous  flapdoodle  of  the  Rev.  Dr.  Orison  Sweet 
Harden.     .     .     .     —The  Smart  Set. 

.  .  .  It  is  a  remarkable  book,  written  in  American  Carlyl- 
ese,  which,  although  at  first  it  irritates,  if  one  will  persevere  with 
it  open-mindedly  becomes  really  fascinating.  Mr.  Lee  is  an 
American  with  a  wonderful  gift  for  crushing  his  views  of  life 
into  nutshell  paragraphs.  Often  there  are  as  many  as  a  dozen 
nutshell  paragraphs  on  a  page.  Then  follow  elaborations,  many 
of  them  original  and  arresting,  as  much  by  their  style  as  their 
matter.  There  is  an  amazing  amount  of  thought  in  the  book. — ■ 
Yorkshire  Post. 

.  .  .  Mr.  Lee  is  both  brilliant  and  original  in  thought  and 
expression,  and  whatever  he  chooses  to  discuss  is  treated  from  an 
entirely  individual  point  of  view.  In  his  initial  chapter  he  ex- 
plains how  he  came  to  write  the  book,  assuring  us  that  "  no  man 
living  in  a  world  as  interesting  as  this  ever  writes  a  book  if  he 
can  help  it."  Readers  in  general  will  be  thankful  that  Mr. 
Lee  couldn't  "help  it."  These  epigrammatic  essays  have  the 
flavor  of  Chesterton  with  a  strong  suggestion  of  Bernard  Shaw. 
Mostly,  however,  they  are  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  —  strikingly 
individual  and  full  of  snap  and  sparkle.  .  .  .  —  San  Fran- 
cisco (Cal.)  Bulletin. 

There  is  a  good  deal  that  suggests  Carlyle  in  "Crowds,"  and 


578  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

notably  those  chapters  in  Book  Five  which  pour  out  contempt 
upon  the  House  of  Commons,  and  by  imphcation  upon  all  legis- 
lative assemblies.  Perfectly  Carlylean  is  the  comparison  made 
between  Oxford  Street,  which  hums,  in  the  author's  picturesque 
phraseology,  and  the  House  of  Commons,  which  hems.  It 
would  be  doing  less  than  justice  to  Mr.  Lee,  however,  to  suggest 
that  his  book  is  primarily  an  imitative  one.  —  The  Nation,  New 
York. 

.  It  is  much  like  Montaigne's  delightful  pages;  that  is, 
it  has  the  same  charm,  the  same  originality  of  expression  about 
the  commonplace  things.  .  .  .  It  is  this  that  makes  the 
book  renowned  around  the  world.  It  is  the  poetry  of  truth, 
the  imagination  applied  to  realities.  .  .  .  —  Los  Angeles 
(Cal.)  Times. 

Now  here  is  a  book  of  nearly  six  hundred  pages.  I  am  wres- 
tling with  the  problem  of  compressing  it  into  two  columns. 
There  are  whole  chapters  that  I  should  like  to  print  on  the  front 
page  of  the  Times  or  the  Daily  Mail.  There  are  sentences  in 
this  book  that  I  should  like  to  hang  up  in  waiting-rooms,  and 
leave  lying  about  in  public  places.  I'm  just  dying  to  meet 
somebody  who  will  let  me  talk  to  them  for  a  couple  of  hours  on 
a  stretch  about  it. 

It  was  this  way:  I  didn't  know  it  was  a  different  kind  of  a 
book  from  other  books,  and  I  took  it  up  as  unsuspectingly  as 
though  I  were  handling  a  Sunday-school  story.  And  all  at 
once  I  found  that  the  writer  was  saying  things  —  things  that 
meant  something,  things  that  mattered.  I  said  to  myself,  "He 
can't  keep  this  up. "  But  he  did  —  for  five  hundred  and  ninety- 
five  pages. 

How  good  it  is  to  meet  with  writing  such  as  this  that  leaves 
the  beaten  tracks  of  thought  and  turns  our  old  truisms  upside 
down!  It's  tiring,  I  grant  you.  I've  been  floored  with  epi' 
grams,  and  picked  up  and  comforted  with  parables.  I've 
had  all  my  mental  furniture  taken  out,  spring-cleaned,  and  put 
back  in  different  places.  I'm  sore  and  tired,  and  breathless 
and  happy.  I  wish  I  could  tell  you  all  about  it  —  Labour 
Leader  (London) . 

.     .     .     The  big  thing  about  this  book  is  you  are  not  going  to 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  579 

read  it  without  having  your  thinking  machinery  started.  Every 
page,  every  paragraph,  every  sentence  almost  is  a  challenge. 
Often  it  is  a  very  saucy,  impertinent  challenge.  The  author  will 
say  something,  and  then  it  is  as  though  he  dares  you  to  agree 
with  him  and  he  defies  you  to  disagree  with  him. 

It  is  this  that  gives  a  book  its  value.  You  are  not  going  to  be 
the  same  after  you  have  read  it  that  you  were  before.  You  will 
think  different  thoughts,  or  if  you  persist  in  thinking  your  old 
thoughts  they  won't  be  quite  the  same  to  you.  One  chapter 
jars  you  out  of  the  old  ruts.*  The  world  of  men  and  women 
and  of  social  and  commercial  systems  will  never  look  quite  the 
same  as  before  you  opened  "Crowds."  —  Press  Knicker. 

.  .  .  The  opening  chapter  asks  the  question,  "Where  are 
we  going?  "  It  begins  with  a  rapid,  racy  and  highly  vivid  sketch 
of  London  when  Mr.  Lee  slips  over  from  New  York,  and  finds 
himself,  almost  before  he  had  thought  of  it,  walking  down  the 
Strand,  suddenly,  instead  of  Broadway.  Not  all  Americans 
see  like  this;  in  fact,  only  one  American  can,  and  his  name  is 
Gerald  Stanley  Lee  and  no  other.     .     .     . 

.  It  may  be  a  rather  queer  jumble,  this  brief  and  un- 
usual description,  but  somehow  when  we  go  to  Ludgate  Circus 
again  we  shall  have  to  see  the  familiar  St.  Paul's,  and  the  railway 
bridge,  and  the]  wide  flowing  river  of  people  as  we  never  saw 
them  before.     .     .     .  —  Leicester  Pioneer  (England). 

Once  upon  a  time  men  were  wont  to  take  things  easily,  but 
that  was  before  Rockefeller,  Carnegie,  Morgan  and  Co.  grew 
richer  and  bought  the  world.  Had  Mr.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee 
lived  in  those  days  he  would  probably  have  spent  a  quiet,  restful 
life  editing  and  annotating  a  new  edition  of  Hobbs's  "Levia- 
than." As  it  is,  Mr.  Lee  has  apparently  taken  it  into  his  head, 
early  one  evening,  to  write  a  book  about  democracy.  He  has 
retired  to  a  quiet  corner  —  if  such  a  thing  is  to  found  in  New 
York  —  and  been  extra  busy  for  a  considerable  number  of 
hours.  Toward  dawn  he  has  laid  down  his  patent  self-filling 
fountain  pen,  leant  back  in  his  chair,  and  remarked  to  himself, 
"I  said  I  would  write  that  book,  and  I  guess  I've  done  it." 
.  .  .  .  Yet  behind  its  trying  and,  at  times,  ridiculous  Yan- 
keeism  lies  a  distinct  contribution  to  the  literature  of  democracy. 
—  Melbourne  Victoria  (Australia). 


580  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

.  .  .  Now  it  is  not  every  one  who  climbs  to  the  roof  of 
the  world  and  breaks  through  the  manhole  in  it,  and  I  am 
inclined  to  think  that  the  first  breath  of  air  one  took  in  that 
uncommon  situation  would  be  apt  to  take  one's  own  breath 
away.  Mr.  Lee,  indeed,  seems  scarcely  to  have  recovered  his 
through  the  600  pages  of  his  treatise,  and  in  this  predicament 
it  cannot  be  easy  to  instruct  one's  audience  in  a  simple,  coher- 
ent, and  convincing  manner. 

.  .  The  Crowd  Man  "will  probably  be  a  kind  of  every- 
day great  man  or  business  statesfnan,  the  man  who  represents 
all  classes,  and  who  proves  it  in  the  way  he  conducts  his  busi- 
ness." Whether  he  is  to  be  here,  or  in  America,  or  e\^ery where, 
I  do  not  quite  make  out.  He  is  to  be  an  interpreter  of  sky- 
scrapers:     .... 

He  shall  reckon  with  skyscraper  men.  He  shall  interpret 
men  that  belong  with  skyscrapers.  I  have  waked  in  the  dawn, 
and  my  heart  has  been  glad  with  the  iron  and  poetry  in  the 
skyscrapers ! 

In  the  name  and  by  the  blessed  memory  of  Walt  —  No ! 

I  also  have  waked  in  the  dawn,  and  my  heart  has  been  sorry 
with  the  transcendental  transcribings  of  the  transcontinental 
transcribblers.  —  Daily  Chronicle. 

.  It  is  a  vertiginous,  chaotic,  cinematographic  book,  a 
combination  of  the  snap-shot  and  the  poem  that  carries  us  well 
toward  futurism.  —  Springfield  Republican. 

You  have,  perhaps,  paused  sometimes  on  a  street  corner  be- 
side a  crowd  gathered  about  a  speaker  standing  elevated  in  its 
midst,  one  wild  of  mien,  gesticulating  madly,  pouring  forth  a 
torrent,  lurid  with  emphasis,  of  chaotic  utterance.  Strange 
and  startling  has  been  the  rushing  confusion  of  his  metaphor. 
Bizarre  and  fascinating  his  amazing  jumble  of  allusions,  in  sup- 
port of  his  whirling  argument,  to  everything  on  the  earth's 
surface,  and  in  the  heavens  above  and  the  waters  beneath. 
Rich  and  fantastic  his  rolling  clouds  of  pronouns  in  reckless  con- 
fusion, one  with  another.  Then,  perhaps,  as  you  have  stood, 
held  somehow  as  by  a  spell  by  this  picturesque  phenomenon, 
analogous,  as  it  were,  to  some  volcanic  eruption  of  nature,  you 
have  felt  the  struggling  movement  of  a  real  idea  in  this  vocifer- 
ous flood.  And  then  the  gentleman's  roar  for  a  moment  has 
beat  upon  you  unheeded  while  you  have  contemplated  as  in  a 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  581 

quiet  place  the  substance  of  his  thought.  Very  much  such  an 
experience  as  this  has  been  ours  with  this  strange  book.  This 
writer,  writing  continually  at  the  top  of  his  voice,  indeed  in 
a  regular  yell,  has  got  hold  here  of  an  alluring  idea,  an  idea 
capable  of  endless,  curious,  striking,  and  philosophic  applica- 
tion. 

The  idea  of  "Sartor  Resartus,"  the  world  seen  as  clothes,  is 
hardly  a  more  spectacular  and  spacious  vehicle  for  the  inter- 
pretation by  the  imagination  of  the  universe  than  this  idea  of 
the  world  seen  as  crowds.     ...  —  New  York  Tribune. 

.  .  .  A  huge,  incoherent,  and  optimistic  study  of  democ- 
racy. It  is  really  the  most  impossible  of  books  to  review  in 
any  detail,  because  it  is  just  one  enormous  jumble  of  ordinary, 
fantastic,  and  acute  ideas.  Mr.  Lee  is  American  to  his  finger- 
tips, and  he  does  not  spare  us  an  ounce  of  his  nationality.  He  is 
cheerful,  slangy,  dogmatic,  strenuous  —  and  all  the  other  things 
we  expect  from  a  typical  American.  And  he  is  also,  as  I  said, 
crammed  full  of  all  sorts  of  notions  which  c(5me  tumbling  on  the 
heels  of  one  another  like  an  avalanche.  His  very  first  para- 
graph is  a  kind  of  trumpet-call  of  his  belief.  ...  In  its 
own  way  (and  I  don't  quite  know  what  that  way  is)  it  must  be  a 
remarkable  performance.  Reading  it  gives  one  an  uneasy,  be- 
wildering sensation  —  rather  like  what  one  feels  in  a  dream 
when  one  knows  that  something  very  important  is  taking  place, 
but  one  can't  actually  realize  what  it  is.  For  Mr.  Lee  is  a 
regular  fountain  of  energy.  His  thoughts  bubble  up  from  him 
almost  before  your  eyes.  You  feel  that  he  can't  keep  pace  with 
them  on  the  page.  .  .  .  Disquisitions  on  Christ,  on  Pier- 
pont  Morgan,  on  Tom  Mann,  on  Woodrow  Wilson,  on  Allen 
Upward,  on  Rockefeller,  on  Carnegie,  and  on  a  great  many 
other  people,  are  jammed  in  amongst  heaps  of  miscellaneous 
opinions,  assertions,  and  incomprehensible  doctrines.  It  is  all 
the  wildest  cataclysm  —  and  yet  it  has  a  certain  vitality  and 
fascination. 

So  with  this  final  note  of  qualified  approval  we  can  leave  the 
astonishing  author  of  "Crowds."  —  The  Bookman  (London). 

I  had  three  copies  of  Inspired  Millionaires  presented  to  me  by 
enthusiasts  who  implored  me  to  write  up  Mr.  Lee  and  add  to 
my  humble  reputation,  and  the  consequence  is  I  have  not  yet 


582  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

read  Inspired  Millionaires  and  feel  irritable  when  I  hear  Mr. 
Stanley  Lee's  name  mentioned.  This  week  Messrs.  Methuen 
send  me  a  new  book  of  Mr.  Lee's,  called  "  Crowds,"  with  a  fairly 
long  typewritten  letter. 

There  may  be  thousands  of  readers  ready  to  acclaim  Mr.  Lee 
as  "the  philosopher,  the  poet  and  the  prophet  of  the  man  in  the 
street,"   but   I   have   read   "Crowds"   with   what  judgment  I 
possess  held  strictly  in  suspense,  and  I  don't  like  it.     .     .     . 
—  Glasgow  News. 


.  .  .  It's  like  a  great,  clumsy,  violent  hand  trying  to  tear 
out  before  us  the  vital  secrets  of  life.  An  enthusiast  wrote  this 
book,  and  it  needs  an  enthusiast  to  understand  it.  .  .  . 
—  The  Bookman  (London). 


And  now  we  can  only  suggest  that  each  and  every  reader  of 
this  book  must  decide  for  himself  whether  or  not  he  likes  it. 
—  Chautauquan  (Chautaqua,  N.  Y.). 

If  Mr.  Lee  had  never  written  or  never  writes  another  line,  the 
immense  gregariousness,  the  pure  Christian  brotherhood 
spirit  of  "Crowds"  would  make  him  famous.  To  explain  his 
book  is  impossible.  You  can  say  things  of  it  and  of  him,  and 
they  are  true,  yet  only  partly  and  inefficiently  so.  To  under- 
stand "Crowds"  you  must  read  it.  —  Philadelphia  Item. 


A  man  by  the  name  of  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  has  written  a  book 
which  he  calls  "Crowds."         .     .     . 

I  am  not  sure  that  this  mass  of  words  really  gets  anywhere, 
that  is,  to  any  definite  place,  but  on  every  page  there  loom  ques- 
tions from  which  you  cannot  escape  —  questions  that  stir  your 
heart,  your  imagination  or  your  sense  of  humor,  what  matter 
which  —  and  you  find  yourself  sitting  dreamily  beneath  your 
droplight,  caught  in  the  maze,  asking,  with  the  author,  "Where 
am  I  going?" 

"  Where  do  I  think  I  want  to  go,  and  why  .f* " 

Some  way  he  has  caught  the  crowd  spirit.  He  marshals  his 
people  and  bids  you  look,  and  directly  you  are  moving  with  lead- 
en feet  among  the  weary  workers,  your  spirit  is  caught  in  faces. 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  583 

old,  young,  pallid,  glad  and  hopeful,  listening  to  the  shuffling 
maelstrom  of  the  crowds,  —  Denver  (Col.)  Times. 

Are  you  one  of  the  five  million  men  —  Americans  of  the  Ger- 
ald Stanley  Lee  type  —  who  helped  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  write 
"Crowds"  (Doubleday,  Page)? 

If  so,  read  "Crowds,"  see  yourself  in  it  and  be  sure  to  give 
Mr.  Lee  the  credit.  If  not,  read  this  book  written  between  five 
million  men  under  the  name  of  one  of  them  and  be  a  better  man 
for  it. 

"I  will  break  through  to  the  five  million  men,"  declares  Mr. 
Lee,  "I  will  make  the  five  million  men  look  at  me  until  they 
recognize  themselves,"  In  case  they  fail  in  this  respect  Mr. 
Lee  will  have  a  brass  band  and  the  Boston  Symphony  Orchestra 
go  through  New  York  and  a  thousand  cities  with  instruments 
playing  "Have  You  Read  'CROWDS'?"  —  "Crowds,"  the  book 
that  is  full  to  overflowing  with  ideas  such  as  the  following: 
.     .     .  —  New  York  Evening  Sun. 

.  .  .  People  say,  "That's  just  what  I've  thought,  but  I 
couldn't  say  it!"  Mr.  Lee  says  it.  .  .  .  — Detroit  Free 
Press. 

Mr.  Lee  has  seen  Business  with  the  eye  of  imagination. 

Perhaps  it  takes  a  man  who  lives  on  a  mountain,  and  goes  to 
London  for  his  excursions,  to  do  this.  He  has  a  fresh  vision 
and  a  habit  of  thinking  to  stand  him  in  good  stead.     .     .     . 

Well,  one  must  concede  Mr.  Lee  one  thing.  He  knows  the 
right  way  to  approach  the  business  man :  he  writes  prose-poetry 
for  him,  for  he  knows  that  the  typical  business  man  is  at 
heart  a  kind  of  minor  poet.  —  Floyd  Dell  in  Chicago  Evening 
Post. 

"Crowds"  defies  classification;  it  isn't  so  much  this  or  that 
literary  form  as  a  man  talking,  a  man  who  would  be  commonly 
described  as  an  idealist,  yet  a  man  with  that  best  sort  of  prac- 
ticality: an  insight  into  life  that  recognizes  its  true  values  and 
discovers  its  eternal  facts  beneath  the  modern  masks.  —  The 
Bellman. 

.     .     .  In  writing  to  a  friend  of  mine,  the  other  day,  I 


584  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

frankly  admitted  that  I  had  gotten  enough  inspiration  out  of  the 
reading  of  "Crowds"  to  keep  me  going  from  now  until  the  end 
of  my  days. 

That's  a  lot  to  say  about  any  book  that  has  come  along  during 
the  last  2000  years,  but  you'll  understand  why  I  said  it  after 
you  have  read  "Crowds."  It  is  not  merely  a  book  —  it  is  a 
jorce  that  works  in  a  marvellous  way.  .  .  .  —  A.  C.  G. 
Hammesfahr  in  Collier  s  Weekly. 

Dr.  Charles  F.  Aked  told  an  immense  audience  of  us  the  other 
day  that  writers  are  successful  mainly  because  they  dare  to  write 
what  we  think  and  don't  dare. 

Gerald  Stanley  Lee  is  an  example.  .  .  .  —  Oakland  In- 
quirer. 

.  And  if  you  are  in  the  habit  of  marking  your  books, 
you  will  mark  every  page  of  "Crowds".  .  .  . — Public 
Opinion"  (England). 

One  fine  day  in  early  June  a  Chicago  business  man  named 
James  Howard  Kehler  happened  into  McClurg's  to  buy  some- 
thing to  read.  He  went  away  with  "Crowds,"  Gerald  Stan- 
ley Lee's  new  book. 

Two  days  afterward  full  page  advertisements  of  "Crowds" 
appeared  in  the  Chicago  newspapers.  They  were  written  and 
paid  for,  not  by  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.,  Mr.  Lee's  publishers, 
but  by  Mr.  James  Howard  Kehler.  One  of  the  things  Mr. 
Lee's  admirer  said  was  this : 

"  I  have  waited  twenty  years  for  somebody  to  write  this  book, 
meanwhile  groping  for  it,  hoping  for  it,  doing  my  best  to  func- 
tion without  it,  trying  to  live  up  to  a  book  not  yet  written." 

Mr.  Kehler  is  evidently  the  kind  of  person  who  when  he  has 
read  a  book  that  he  likes  wants  every  one  else  to  experience  his 
pleasure.  In  this  case  his  enthusiasm  was  deep  enough  to 
strike  his  pocket  nerve,  sufficient  proof  of  its  sincerity. 

The  third  day  after  Mr.  Kehler's  first  advertisement  of 
'Crowds"  appeared  the  publishers  wired  him  to  hold  off  and 
give  them  a  chance  to  catch  up  —  their  presses  were  going  all 
the  time  on  "Crowds,"  that  they  were  being  avalanched  with 
orders,  and  that  the  third  edition  wouldn't  be  ready  for  several 
days.     .     .     .  —  New  York  Morning  Telegraph. 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  585 

From  announcement  in  Publishers'  Weekly 

''Crowds''  was  the  best-selling  book  of  non-fiction  sold  between 
the  first  of  September  and  the  first  of  October  in 

NEW   YORK  DETROIT  WORCESTER 

CHICAGO  SAN   FRANCISCO  ST.    PAUL 

BALTIMORE  LOS  ANGELES  SEATTLE 

DALLAS  LOUISVILLE  PORTLAND    (Ore.) 

It  ranked  second  in  popularity  among  the  reading  public  of 

ST.    LOUIS  BOSTON 

INDIANAPOLIS  PITTSBURGH 

And  fourth  best  in 

PHILADELPHIA  ROCHESTER 

"  Crotcds  "  has  now  been  America  s  best-selling  book  of  non-fiction  for  more  than 
six  months. 

From  a  Letter: 

Department  of  English,  The  University  of  Minnesota 

October   5. 

My  Dear  Lee:  "Crowds"  is  about  the  most  encouraging 
spectacle  that  has  come  to  my  notice  for  years.  Here  is  a  book 
that  I  would  no  more  expect  to  be  popular  than  I  would  Car- 
lyle's  "Sartor  Resartus,"  and,  by  Gosh!  it  sells!  It  is  proof 
positive  that  humans  hunger  for  the  higher,  a  truth  I  have 
always  believed  and  tried  to  get  into  my  poetry;  though,  of 
course,  being  poetry,  only  a  person  here  and  there  knows  it. 

The  book  came  to  me  just  as  I  was  leaving  for  the  summer, 
and  I  didn't  take  it  with  me;  too  full  up  with  other  books  neces- 
sary for  a  six  weeks'  lecture  trip.  So  now  let  me  thank  you  for 
it,  and  say  I'm  reading  it,  and  that  I  recognize  it  as  one  of  the 
most  truly  original  pieces  of  literary  work  of  the  time,  and  a 
very  noble  performance  indeed.  Any  one  who  fails  to  see  that 
is  hopelessly  dedicated  to  mediocre  stuff  and  is  out  of  the  run- 
ning. It  is  literature  in  form,  and  a  mighty  interesting  thing 
because  of  the  unusualness  of  the  form.  Also,  it  is  literature  be- 
cause it  says  a  vastly  true  and  important  thing,  and  says  it 
individually.     You  have  dived  down  to  a  central  fact  of  mod- 


386  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

ern  life,  fetched  it  up,  held  it  high  for  folks  to  see,  turned  it 
every  side  around,  and  given  us  self-respect  in  the  seeing.  Gee, 
but  that's  worth  doing!  And  right  on  top  of  it  comes  the 
miracle  of  the  way  it  sells.  It  makes  me  dizzy  in  its  implication  of 
the  good  in  people.  How  in  the  world  they  found  it  out,  beats 
me.  But  that  they  did,  I'm  deeply  glad;  not  for  your  sake 
alone  (though  to  sit  and  hear  that  money  come  in,  clinkity- 
clink,  must  be  a  new  and  intoxicating  kind  of  music)  but  for 
everybody's  sake.  I  abase  myself  before  you,  I,  one  who  sell 
by  ones  and  twos;  I  saalam,  remove  my  shoes,  whisper  hoarse 
congratulations,  back  off  and  look  at  you,  and  say  Hush!  to 
those  who  go  by  as  if  nothing  were  in  front  of  them.  For,  sir, 
you  have  broken  the  record,  and  made  McCutcheon  and  Cham- 
bers look  like  two  spots,  God  bless  you,  you  have  done  us  all 
good!  Richard  Burton. 

There  are  561  pages  in  this  book,  and  the  whole  is  a  little  more 
than  the  author's  circumlocutory  affirmation  of  the  author's  con- 
viction that  people  ought  to  be  good  to  one  another !  —  Minne- 
apolis Journal. 

No  fear  of  being  ridiculous,  or  usual,  or  hackneyed  withholds 
him  from  saying  what  he  wishes  to  say.  —  Chicago  Tribune. 

Brotherhood,  which  is  just  as  good  business  as  it  is  morals, 
is  Lee's  keynote,  and  his  treatment  of  the  idea  is  so  frank  and 
fine,  so  cogent  and  appealing,  that  it  all  seems  as  simple  as  A 
B  C.  In  short,  he  has  got  hold  of  ,a  great  big  idea  that  lies  right 
under  our  nose,  which  is  why  we  didn't  see  it;  and  presented  the 
idea  in  an  original,  striking  way  that  brings  it  home,  and  will 
make  it  unforgettable.     .     ,     . 

.     The  more  you  think  about  it,  the  more  you  compre- 
hend it  as  a  succinct,  happy  statement  of  deep  truth. 

.  .  .  The  author  calls  it  "a  book  for  the  individual," 
and  he  is  right.  It  is  for  you  and  me,  and  therefore  for  every- 
body. A  stimulating,  brilliant,  profound  deliverance,  a  gen- 
uine piece  of  literature.  —  The  Bellman. 

To  quote  Mr.  Lee's  striking  passages  would  be  to  reproduce 
the  book.  Nearly  all  are  striking,  and  sometimes  they  strike 
so  hard  as  to  hurt.  —  San  Francisco  Argonaut. 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  587 

The  author  of  "Inspired  MilHonaires"  has  a  claim  on  our 
attention.  Therefore  we  have  read  his  present  production  of 
600  pages,  unless  we  have  inadvertently  missed  a  page  occa- 
sionally; there  is  such  a  platitudinous  sameness  that  we  may 
have  unintentionally  done  so.  No  one  will  dissent  from  Mr. 
Lee's  copybook  maxims,  unless  provoked  to  do  so  by  their 
reiteration,  but  with  his  estimates  of  men  and  things  we  are 
certainly  at  variance.     .     .     .  —  The  Athenaeum. 

.  .  .  The  remarkable  chapter  entitled  "The  Machine 
Trainers"  ...  is  strongly  reminiscent  of  the  most  notable 
chapters  in  Samuel  Butler's  "Erewhon,"  and  the  style  has  more 
than  a  flavour  of  the  Carlylean.  Lee  is  a  thinker  of  uncommon 
imagination.     .     .     .  — The  Globe  (London). 

.  .  .  The  reader  may  judge  of  Mr.  Lee  from  these  ex- 
tracts. He  is  breezy,  cheerful,  persuasive,  colloquial,  full  of 
American  shrewdness  and  humour,  and  if  now  and  again  he  is 
stirred  to  some  sharp  thrust  or  vivid  invective,  it  seems  to  es- 
cape him  unawares,  and  in  a  twinkling  he  is  back  on  his  old 
track,  preaching  serenity,  hope,  and  belief  in  human  nature. 
To  get  the  vision  down  to  earth  is  often  a  desperate  matter, 
and  we  see  him  struggling  valiantly  with  ideas  that  come  and  go, 
with  digressions  and  excursions  that  as  often  as  not  lead  nowhere 
and  will  not  be  subdued  to  any  consecutive  scheme.  He  comes 
to  London,  and  all  manner  of  ideas  are  suggested  to  him  by  the 
Dock  Strike  and  the  Railway  Strike,  the  man  in  the  street,  and 
the  newspapers,  and  the  House  of  Commons.  He  goes  back  to 
America,  and  another  set  of  ideas  rush  in  upon  him  from  Wash- 
ington and  New  York,  and  the  new  President  and  Mr.  Carnegie 
and  Mr.  Rockefeller.  Everything  goes  down  as  it  comes,  in  a 
stream  of  lively,  intimate  comment  which  is  never  dull  and  is 
often  brilliant.  Result,  a  book  full  of  life  and  human  nature, 
in  which  the  moral  is  everywhere  and  nowhere,  and  which 
is  so  lively  and  original  that  it  compels  you  to  read  on,  even 
when  the  argument  escapes  you.  .  .  .  —  Westminster  Gazette 
(London). 

An  altogether  wonderful  book,  a  sort  of  day  of  judgment  for 
our  modem  world,  in  which  its  whole  inner  and  outer  is  weighed 
down  to  the  last  ounce.  —  Christian  World  (London). 


588  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

Putting  the  world  to  rights  is  a  very  old  dream. 

It  is  a  dream  that  comes  to  all  of  us  at  some  time  or  other  — 
mostly  in  flamboyant  youth,  sometimes  in  philosophic  old  age; 
rarely,  if  ever,  in  busy,  prosaic  middle  life. 

At  back  of  the  purpose  of  "Crowds,"  a  book  just  published 
which  will  set  the  world  thinking  and  talking,  is  the  same  old 
dream  —  a  beautiful,  illusive  dream  as  it  always  seems  in  the 
end,  but  none  the  less  a  dream  that  is  ever  worth  dream- 
ing.    ... 

.  .  .  In  short,  this  wonderful  book,  which  says  hopeful 
things  and  scathing  things  fearlessly,  tells  you  how  to  save 
the  world.     .     \ 

.  .  .  Face  it  yourself  —  where  are  you  going?  —  and  then 
you  begin  to  realize  what  after  all  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  is  driving 
at  in  "Crowds."     .     .     .  —  Daily  Sketch. 

This  book  is  full  of  American  hustle.  It  has  the  sign  and 
note  and  character  of  American  civilization.  Six  hundred 
pages  of  lively,  epigrammatic  sayings,  comments,  and  sugges- 
tions of  one  sort  or  another. 

The  vigorous  individuality  of  the  author  is  refreshing.  He  is 
as  cocksure  of  everything  as  most  folk  are  of  anything.  He  is 
announced  as  the  poet  and  philosopher  and  interpreter  of 
crowds,  and  makes  a  dazzling  attempt  to  fulfil  this  role.  — 
Daily  Herald  (London). 

There  are  people  in  the  United  States  who  regard  Mr.  Stanley 
Lee  as  the  modern  incarnation  of  the  spirit  of  Whitman.  The 
present  writer  believes  he  is  not  the  only  Englishman  whose 
opinion  of  Whitman  has  been  modified  by  a  visit  to  America. 
One  had  formerly  regarded  him  as  unique,  or  at  least  as  a  vast 
unique  expression  of  the  national  spirit  in  its  noblest  form. 
One's  admiration  for  him  remains,  but  in  the  actual  modern 
America  one  has  found  hundreds  of  little  Whitmans,  and  by 
going  farther  would  have  found  millions.  Everywhere  one 
encountered  commonplace  embodiments  of  that  audacious 
spirit,  men  who  talked  in  large,  vague  terms  about  fellowship, 
individualism,  national  self-consciousness,  and  the  genial  love 
of  your  neighbour  —  men  who  dwelt  at  length  on  the  subject 
of  teeming  cities,  tilled  fields,  and  pioneers  of  progress,  while 
they  toyed  with  their  coffee-cups  or  their  cigars.  They  were 
not  all  Walt  Whitmans,  but  in  showing  the  common  origin  of 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  580 

the  poet's  sentiments  they  made  one  aware  that  he,  too,  is  not 
lacking  in  that  braggadocio  which  is  an  American  quahty.  The 
same  large  assertiveness  appears  in  any  general  conversation. 
It  is  demanded  from  preachers  and  orators.  No  man  could 
hope  to  be  elected  President  unless  he  could  administer  enor- 
mous doses  of  this  violent  and  windy  rhetoric. 

Mr.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee,  as  the  publishers  inform  us,  has 
been  called  "the  most  remarkable  American  writer  since  Walt 
Whitman."  There  have  been  better  American  books,  but  per- 
haps none  more  remarkable.  A  man  could  hardly  believe  it 
possible  that  this  book  could  have  been  really  popular  who  had 
not  heard  Mr.  Roosevelt  make  popular  speeches  to  vast  audi- 
ences. But  one  is  bound  to  admire  Mr.  Lee's  writing  for  the 
same  reason  that  one  admires  Mr.  Roosevelt's  oratory  —  for 
the  extraordinary  physical  vitality  that  it  betrays.  For  six 
hundred  pages  Mr.  Lee  maintains  the  same  loud,  strident  tone, 
shouting  about  himself  and  his  ideas  and  his  emotions  and  his 
hopes  for  his  expectant  fellow-creatures,  without  faltering, 
without  a  sign  of  fatigue.  He  has  mastered  the  easy  Whit- 
manesque  rhythm.  His  thundering  sentences  are  alternately 
long  and  short,  rolling  forth  with  Delphic  confidence.  He  em- 
braces all  mankind  and  all  human  energy  with  unfailing  mag- 
nanimity. He  believes  in  the  heroic  individual.  He  believes 
in  the  crowd.  Whitman,  Carlyle,  and  Mr.  Chesterton  have 
together  formed  his  style  and  bolstered  him  up  in  his  assertive 
optimism.     ... 

.  .  .  But  what  is  really  interesting  about  his  book  is  not 
the  matter,  but  the  manner.  This  sort  of  thing  "goes  down," 
we  are  assured,  with  the  American  crowd.  This  sort  of  egoistic, 
fantastic,  assertive  tub-thumping  receives  attention;  it  creates 
upon  the  jaded  intelligence  the  violent  shock  necessary  to 
awake  it  from  intellectual  fatigue.  The  American  newspapers 
—  and,  indeed,  we  have  such  newspapers  in  England  —  make 
the  same  sort  of  appeal  by  dint  of  repeated  shocks  upon  both 
the  eye  and  the  mind.  Theodore  Roosevelt  has  this  knack  of 
speech  in  his  popular  oratory.  Mr.  Taft,  who  had  the  support 
of  many  millionaires,  was  handicapped  by  not  possessing  this 
gift  of  rhetoric.  In  a  writer  who  has  absorbed  Whitman, 
Nietzsche,  and  Mr.  Chesterton  it  is  mingled  with  the  dithy- 
rambic  note  observable  in  the  following:     .     .     . 

Mr.  Lee  has  not  misunderstood  his  public.  His  own  success 
is  evidence  that  he  has  gauged  it  rightly.     The  language  of  the 


590  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

American  newspapers,  the  speeches  of  Mr.  Roosevelt,  support 
his  view.  The  question  is:  what  about  that  portion  of  the 
public  which  can  only  be  effectively  addressed  in  this  way? 
We  in  England  cannot  afford  to  throw  stones,  but  if  we  are  to 
reckon  with  American  sentiment  it  is  worth  while  to  know  what 
sort  of  problem  confronts  American  educationists.  Mr.  Lee's 
book  should  help  us.  —  The  New  Statesman  (London). 

Mr.  Lee  reminds  us  of  Mr.  Robert  Blatchford.  He  is  not  so 
direct.  He  is  not  so  well  informed.  He  deals  in  theories  where 
Mr.  Blatchford  dealt  either  with  facts  or  what  might  very  well 
pass  for  facts.  He  is  not  a  socialist,  nor  is  he  quite  so  definite 
as  Mr.  Blatchford  concerning  the  precise  specific  which  he  is 
recommending  for  the  cure  of  the  world.  But  he  has  the  same 
self-confidence,  the  same  bold  windiness  of  rhetoric,  the  same 
habit  of  button-holing  the  universe  and  taking  it  into  his  con- 
fidence.    ... 

.  .  .  Mr.  Lee  has  based  himself  mainly  upon  Carlyle  and 
Walt  Whitman,  but  he  has  introduced  into  the  mixture  a  strong 
infusion  of  Nietzsche,  Mr.  Chesterton,  and  the  American  mob- 
orator.  —  The  English  Review. 

Mr.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  has  shot  his  bolt.  All  that  has  passed 
in  the  two  years  since  "Inspired  Millionaires"  was  published  has 
left  him  more  enthusiastic  and  more  incoherent  than  he  was 
before.  Moreover,  this  unresting  enthusiasm  for  machines, 
and  for  the  men  who  will  master  them,  this  ideal  of  continual 
production,  continual  increase,  everlasting  work,  produces  at 
last  a  feeling  of  revulsion.  Mr.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  has  no 
repose;  he  says  a  thing  again  and  again,  not  like  Nietzsche's 
Wagner,  until  we  believe  it,  but  until  the  lines  from  one  of  Mr. 
Jack  C.  Squire's  parodies  come  ringing  into  our  memory: 

Brushing  wide  heaven  with  the  stridenee  of  her  rustling  wings. 
Enacting  once  again  the  old,  old  tragedy  with  her  pitiless  wings,     .     .     . 
Proclaiming,  exultant,  triumphant,  with  steely  clarion,  the  victory  of  her 

titanic  wings. 
The  whole  air  is  filled  with  the  clamour  of  innumerable  wings. 

At  last,  the  impression  produced  by  these  594  pages  of  shout- 
ing exultation  is  not  the  impression  of  a  man;  but,  if  I  may  vary 
one  of  Mr.  Squire's  best  mixed  metaphors,  "  it  is  engines,  en- 
gines, all  the  way,  but  not  a  drop  to  drink."  —  The  New  Age. 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  591 

Gerald  Stanley  Lee,  whether  seen  and  heard  in  the  flesh  or 
through  his  writings,  is  a  remarkable  man.  A  keen  observer  of 
men  and  manners,  "  scenting  the  world,  looking  it  full  in  face," 
like  Browning's  "man  of  mark,"  witty,  eloquent,  and  epi- 
grammatic, he  may  be  depended  upon  to  be  interesting,  and  to 
be  surprising  and  brilliant  in  what  he  has  to  say.  He  speaks 
with  an  American  accent :  he  writes  with  the  same  accent,  and 
also  an  American  business-like  cast  of  thought  which  gives  a 
marvellous  directness  and  reality  even  to  his  most  dreamy  and 
idealistic  passages.  He  is  a  lever  of  mankind,  an  ardent  be- 
liever in  thijs  present  world,  and  a  brave  man  not  in  the  least 
afraid  to  speak  his  mind.  —  Leicester  Pioneer. 

.  .  .  We  all  feel  the  better  for  Mr.  Lee's  boisterous  greet- 
ing, and  his  book  will  supply  us  with  enough  homely  epigrams 
to  furnish  forth  a  hundred  evening  papers  till  Mr.  Lee  writes 
another  book.  No  doubt,  however,  he  has  had  time  to  write 
another  while  we  have  been  reading  this.  —  Englishwoman. 

.  .  .  In  the  matter  of  style  there  is  American  and  Ameri- 
can, just  as  there  is  English  and  English,  and  Mr.  Lee's  bears 
about  the  same  relation  to  Whitman's  as  the  style  of  a  ha'- 
penny paper  does  to  that  of  Milton.  .  .  .  The  idea  which 
remains  most  clearly  in  the  reader's  mind  after  perusing  Mr. 
Lee's  pages  is  that  Mr.  Lee's  most  distinct  belief  is  that  he  is  the 
original  author  and  patentee  of  what  was  a  fairly  well-known 
proverb  before  Mr.  Lee  was  born.  "Honesty  is  the  best 
policy."     .     .     .  —  Sunday  Times  and  Sunday  Special. 

Mr.  Lee  has  been  likened  to  Walt  Whitman,  and  with  much 
reason.  He  has  the  same  passionate  belief  in  democracy,  the 
same  enthusiasm  for  his  native  land,  and,  in  some  measure,  the 
same  gift  of  torrential  language.     .     . 

.  Six  hundred  pages  of  startling  paradox,  of  un- 
conventional views  on  all  possible  subjects,  of  dogmatic  and 
entirely  unproved  and  unprovable  statements,  of  forceful  but 
often  slangy  and  colloquial  English,  make  a  strong  claim  on  the 
patience  and  forbearance  of  the  reader.  But  it  is  worth  the 
effort.  It  is  not  given  to  many  writers  to  pound  the  truth  into 
his  hearers  as  this  strong  and  courageous  author  never  hesitates 
to  do. 

.     .     .     Humour,  however,  is  not  lacking,  and  is  of  the  dry 


592  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

American  school  which  appeals  to  all  divisions  of  the  great 
Anglo-Saxon  family.     ... 

.  .  .  It  is  clear  that  Mr.  Lee  has  an  underlying  deep  sense 
of  the  poetry  of  human  existence,  and  this  adds  a  vivid  touch 
to  his  pictures  of  men  and  things.  —  Yorkshire  Observer 

Here  is  a  book  that  might  have  been  good,  almost  great,  had 
the  author  cultivated  self-restraint  and  lucidity  in  writing.  As 
it  is,  the  "Crowds"  of  words  that  tumble  over  each  other  do  not 
often  reveal  themselves  to  those  who  attempt  to  read  with  a 
view  to  dig  out  the  meaning.  —  Investor's  Review. 

.  .  .  Clearly  we  must  take  this  writer  seriously,  but  we 
must  not  take  him  heavily  or  prosaically.  ...  —  West- 
minster Gazette. 

"Crowds"  is  more  than  a  book;  it  is  a  prophecy  and  a  policy; 
and  it  includes  as  part  of  its  vision  and  its  purpose  the  protection 
of  genius  from  the  policy  of  crucifixion. 

Gerald  Stanley  Lee  is  the  prophet  of  the  plutocracy,  as 
Carlyle  was  the. prophet  of  the  gentry,  Carlyle's  appeal  and 
warning  to  the  ruling  class  of  his  day  was  summed  up  in  the 
sentence:  "The  organisation  of  labour  is  the  universal,  vital 
problem  of  the  world."  Mr.  Lee's  more  genial  appeal  to  the 
millionaires  adds  something  to  that  text.  For  he  treats  the 
organisation  of  industry  as  a  high  art,  the  new  art  of  our  new 
age,  and  he  invites  the  millionaire  to  take  himself  seriously  and 
nobly  as  an  artist,  that  is  to  say,  as  a  genius,  of  the  same  race 
and  calling  as  the  inventor,  the  poet,  and  the  prophet. 

Carlyle's  prophecy  fell  on  deaf  ears.  The  squires,  as  he  bit- 
terly observed,  were  too  busy  in  preserving  their  game  to  think 
of  preserving  men;  and  as  a  consequence  they  failed  to  preserve 
themselves.  Their  reign  is  over.  The  old  English  aristocracy, 
the  aristocracy  of  birth  and  breeding,  is  sinking  into  the  servile 
class.  The  Norman  peeress  earns  her  living  as  the  chaperon 
of  the  Jewish  financier's  wife  and  daughters.  Eton  and  Oxford 
are  turning  out  private  secretaries  and  travelling  companions 
for  the  graduates  of  Wall  Street.     .     .     . 

.  .  .  It  will  be  interesting  to  see  whether  the  aristocracy 
of  business  and  gambling  —  for  half  of  business  is  gambling  — 
pays  any  more  heed  to  its  prophet  than  the  Duke  of  Rutland 
paid  to  Carlyle.     Will  the  Rockefellers  consent  to  be  saved? 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  -593 

What  are  the  Hooleys  and  Whitaker  Wrights  and  Barney  Bar- 
natos  going  to  do  with  Gerald  Stanley  Lee?  ...  —  The 
New  Freewoman. 

From  Life:  The  other  day,  as  I  came  along  a  back  street  in 
Boston,  I  saw  a  bunch  of  people  gathered  in  front  of  the  entrance 
to  one  of  those  "Dangerous  Passing"  alleys.  Five  or  six  men, 
a  woman  or  two,  and  about  a  dozen  boys  (all  holding  desperately 
back  and  pushing  eagerly  forward  at  the  same  time)  were 
squeezed  up  against  an  imaginary  semicircular  barrier  about  ten 
feet  distant  from  a  tiny  speck  of  a  dog  that  was  huddled  in  the 
corner  of  a  brick  wall.  And  the  dog  was  wearing  a  wildish  look 
in  its  distracted  brown  eyes  and  at  the  extreme  left-hand  corner 
of  its  little  mouth  it  displayed  —  a  bubble. 

I  went  over  to  it  and  said  a  few  comforting  things  to  it  in  dog 
talk,  and  then  I  picked  it  up  (it  was  about  three  months  old)  and 
cuddled  it  a  bit.  And  then,  first  shaking  itself  well  to  get  rid  of 
its  hallucination  of  impending  doom,  it  looked  up  and  licked 
my  chin.  And  you  ought  to  have  heard  those  people !  The  pet 
names  they  called  that  pup!  And  the  assurances  they  gave  it, 
and  me,  and  each  other,  that  they  hadn't  ever  really  thought 
that  it  was  mad!  And  four  of  the  boys  offered  to  adopt  it  on 
the  spot,  and  were  syndicating  the  proposition  when  I  left. 
You  see,  all  along  and  almost  to  a  man  those  people  had  wanted 
to  believe  in  that  dog;  but  half  of  'em  had  been  afraid  to,  and  the 
other  half  hadn't  known  how  to  go  about  it.  But  all  that  they 
really  needed  was  a  good  boost. 

There  have  been  a  lot  of  truths  —  fine,  young,  promising, 
pedigreed  ones,  some  of  them;  and  others  bright,  old,  unclaimed 
mongrels  —  that  thousands  and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  us 
Americans  have  been  wanting  to  believe  about  human  nature 
for  some  time  now.  Almost  any  day  you  could  have  seen  a 
bunch  of  us  standing  round  some  back  alley  entrance,  looking, 
fascinated  and  frightened,  at  one  of  them.  We  have  wanted 
to  believe  in  them,  but  we  "didn't  dast."  We'd  have  liked  to 
adopt  them  and  try  them  out,  but  we  didn't  know  where  "to 
take  holt."  We  weren't  exactly  scared,  only  we  needed  some 
one  to  put  us  in  countenance. 

And  here,  shoving  to  the  front  with  a  fine,  free  nonchalant  air 
of  doing  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world,  comes  Gerald  Stan- 
ley Lee;  comes  a  poet,  a  dreamer,  an  idealist;  a  man  whom  we 
praised  and  patronized,  and  loved  and  pitied  —  comes  Gerald 


594  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

Stanley  Lee,  the  editor  and  sole  contributor  to  the  "Mount 
Tom"  magazine,  author  of  the  almost  forgotten  "Lost  Art 
of  Reading,"  and  of  the  almost  unread  "Voice  of  the  Machines," 
and  of  the  locally  sneered  at  but  foreignly  buzzed  about  "In- 
spired Millionaires"  —  comes  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  and  picks  up 
the  pup.  And,  lo  and  behold,  it  licks  his  chin!  And  we  all 
instantly  see  how  easy  it  was,  and  that  human  nature  isn't  really 
as  bad  as  we'd  been  shamed  into  letting  on. 

It's  by  a  book  called  "Crowds"  that  he  has  done  it;  a  big, 
easy-going,  loose-jointed,  nearly  six-hundred -page  book  about 
you  and  me  and  the  man  next  door;  about  God  and  million- 
aires and  department  stores  and  the  President  and  the  cook; 
about  business  and  politics,  and  what  we  all  want  and  don't  dare 
ask  for,  and  about  how  we're  going  to  get  it.  About  America 
and  Americans.     About  where  we're  going. 

I  once  heard  a  small  kid,  standing  on  a  bluff  above  the  Wis- 
consin River,  ask  another  youngster,  a  bit  bigger,  where  the 
river  came  from.  "  Oh,"  answered  the  other,  pointing  a  chubby 
finger,  "from  way  up  there."  "Yes,"  insisted  the  first,  "but 
from  how  far?"  And  then  the  other  swelled  visibly  before  our 
eyes,  and  putting  on  a  look  of  preternatural  gravity,  answered: 
"From  way  up  beyond  to-morrow's  morning  and  to-morrow's 
morning  and  to-morrow's  morning!"  That's  the  way  you 
feel  when  asked  questions   about  "Crowds." 

It's  the  most  religious  book  published  in  this  country  since 
"Uncle  Tom's  Cabin."  —  J.  B.  Kerfoot,  in  Life. 

From  a  Letter  to  Mr.  Kehler: 

It  seems  to  me  the  greatest  book  I  ever  read.  It  may  be 
described  in  the  words  Gladstone  used  about  the  Federal  Con- 
stitution, to  the  effect  that  it  is  the  greatest  single  document 
ever  struck  at  one  time  by  the  hand  of  man.  But  that  was  a 
composite  work.     .     . 

It  certainly  ought  to  have  the  Nobel  Prize,  especially  as  it 
was  so  evidently  written  without  any  intention  of  competing 
for  it.  .  .  .  What  I  look  forward  to  —  nothing  less  is  the 
making  and  the  marking  of  an  epoch  by  it,  not  only  in  the 
v^arious  activities  of  life  with  which  it  is  especially  concerned, 
but  in  all  literature  and  drama.  The  person  unfamiliar  with 
it  will  suffer  enormously  in  such  fields,  and  every  one  who  does 
not  know  it  will  be  obliged  to  echo  its  sentiments  and  ideas 
abroad  and  aloud.     .     .     .     Lee  is  the  first  person  I  have  ever 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  595 

known  to  prove  himself  vaster  than  the  civihzation  that  begat 
him  —  vast  enough  to  pull  it  around  by  the  nose. 

Signed     

"Who  on  earth  is  Gerald  Stanley  Lee?  That  is  a  godlike 
article  on  Machinery  and  the  Machine  Age.  He  will  be  (unless 
he  degenerates)  one  of  the  great  forces  of  American  literature. 

—  William  James. 

(From  a  letter  to  the  editor  of  the  Atlantic  after  the  appearance  of 
Mr.  Lee's  ideas  on  crowds  and  machines  fifteen  years  ago.) 

To  the  Editor  of  Everybody's:  Your  Advertising  Goodness 
hits  hard.  Please  tell  Mr.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  that  he  is  on 
my  book  for  a  setting  of  my  prize  winning  Brown  Leghorn  Eggs 
free  to  any  address  that  he  names.  The  best  that  I  own  is  my 
Brown  Leghorn  Hens!  .  .  .  Better  send  on  the  address 
to  this  hen  and  get  the  eggs ! —  H.  F.  McGuire,  Wilton,  N.  H. 

From  a  letter,  dated,  The  Church  of  the  Messiah,  Louis- 
ville, Ky.  .  .  .  There  is  so  much  sermon  material  in 
"Crowds"  that  I  want  to  use  it  during  the  winter  in  what  I 
say.  The  point  is  "May  I.^"  My  own  well-springs  are  not 
dry,  but  in  reading  the  book  I  shall  be  apt,  as  I  talk,  to  say  things 
as  "Crowds"  says  them,  and  not  stop  each  and  every  time  to 
say  "Thus  says  Mr.  Lee." 

Do  you  mind  if  I  do  this  —  if  as  I  say,  I  plainly  state  at  the 
beginning  to  the  people  that  we  use  your  book  as  a  textbook? 

Maxwell  Savage. 

Readers  of  Collier's  Weekly  will  recall  the  astounding  case  of 
Louis  Victor  Eytinge  related  there  —  Eytinge  the  forger  and 
murderer  serving  a  life  term  in  Arizona  state  prison,  the  man 
who  in  jail  discovered  the  value  of  honesty  and  the  power  of 
his  words,  who  now  earns  a  considerable  salary  by  writing  for 
business  firms  advertisements  which  are  the  wonder  of  adver- 
tising men.  "They  had  penned  him  up  to  die,  and  he  would 
not  die.  They  sent  him  to  jail,  a  crook,  and  lo!  his  voice  was  a 
power  for  honesty." 

Eytinge  recently  was  sent  a  copy  of  "Crowds.".  He  wrote 
as  follows  to  Thomas  Drier,  Editor  of  Associated  Advertising, 
one  of  the  men  who  believes  in  him,  and  who  helped  to  give 
him  his  chance: 


596  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

"I  do  like  'Crowds'  —  like  it  too  blamed  well.  My  line 
was  that  I  would  not  be  a  crowd-man,  meaning  that  I  would 
have  to  stand  out  from,  and  above,  the  crowd,  and  the  blamed 
book  makes  me  more  earnest  in  my  resolve.  Like  you,  I  can't 
read  the  book  through.  It  won't  let  me.  Causes  too  much 
thought." 

I  have  a  grave  suspicion  that  "Crowds"  is  the  most  important 
book  —  (in  its  meaning  to  the  present  world)  that  has  been 
written  in  4,000  years.  I  have  been  waiting  for  some  brave 
critic  to  say  this.  I  am  not  certain  that  there  is  any  critic  in 
America  brave  enough  to  say  it  even  if  he  were  brave  enough  to 
think  it  was  true. 

This  is  because  the  book  is  the  truest,  biggest  picture  of  our 
world  as  it  is  to-day. 

"  Crowds  "  is  a  crucible.  You  cast  your  soul  into  it  —  if  you 
have  a  soul  —  and  it  comes  forth  changed.  If  it  doesn't,  then 
the  thing  you  thought  was  a  soul  isn't  a  soul  at  all. 

Out  of  the  gray  mists  and  the  red  fires  of  4,000  years  this 
book  has  come.  The  man  who  wrote  it  has  seen  marvelously : 
as  if  he  stood  upon  the  highest  mountain  top  in  the  world,  and 
the  earth  lay  flat  before  him.  To  reach  the  mountain,  that 
man,  hungering  and  thirsting,  must  have  crossed  far  deserts  where 
strange  altar  fires  forever  burn.  .  .  .  — John  Strong, 
Toledo  Times. 

A  Pink  Tea  Rhapsody.  —  John  Neihardt,  Minneapolis 
Journal. 

Gerald  Stanley  Lee  is  poetry  brought  down  to  the  last  second 
of  the  last  minute  of  the  last  hour  of  the  day  of  the  last  month 
of  the  present  year  nineteen  thirteen.  What  I  like  about  him 
is  that  he  sees  the  present,  the  past,  and  the  future  all  in  a 
radiant  vision. —  Jack  London. 

An  exasperating  book  to  some  readers  because  the  points  on 
which  we  most  violently  take  issue  with  Mr.  Lee  are  the  very 
points  on  which  he  is  hardest  to  refute. —  Publishers'  Weekly. 

A  book  for  Socialists  to  avoid. —  Neio  York  Call. 

Last  June  we  got  a  copy  of  "  Crowds,"  by  Gerald  Stanley  Lee, 
who  looks  like  William  Hawley  Smith  with  Opie  Read's  hair. 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  597 

We  put  it  in  our  grip  and  have  read  it  seven  months,  and  25,000 
miles.  We  would  read  it  in  California,  get  mad  at  it,  and  put 
it  back  in  the  grip.  Then  some  night  in  Minnesota  we'd  ex- 
hume it  and  root  through  more  chapters  and  become  further 
enraged.  Again  in  Texas  or  Florida  or  Connecticut  the  book 
would  come  forth.  It  wouldn't  down.  It  thrilled  us,  de- 
lighted us,  and  enraged  us.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  doesn't  agree 
with  us  very  often.  That  proves  he  isn't  right  very  often. 
But  a  book  that  you  will  lug  along  on  a  lyceum  journey  month 
after  month  is  a  very  wonderful  book.  The  author  is  a  very 
wonderful  man  —  with  wonderful  inside  eyes  —  powers  of 
generalization  and  expression. —  Lyceum  Magazine. 


"CROWDS" 

O  knowest  Gerald  Stanley  Lee? 
A  droll  philosopher  is  he  — 
And  whimsical?  Jehosaphat! 
Such  odd  things  as  are  in  his  hat. 
Upon  the  summit  of  Mount  Tom 
He  sits  in  reverie  and  calm, 
Discoursing  there  of  all  that  go 
About  him  on  the  earth  below. 
His  flavor  is  of  such  a  kind 
As  soothes  and  orients  the  mind; 
His  wit  and  raillery  are  rare 
And  bracing  as  the  mountain  air; 
His  vision  is  beyond  the  scope 
Of  any  man-made  telescope, 
And  far  beyond  the  bending  skies 
His  swift  imagination  flies. 

Now,  I  have  seen  him  sitting  there 

These  many  years  among  the  clouds, 
But  few  men  spied  him  in  the  air 

Until  he  hurled  among  us  "Crowds." 
The  impact  of  that  book  was  such, 

That,  looking  up,  we've  come  to  stop 
And  chatter  frequently  and  much. 

About  the  man  upon  the  top. 


598  AN  EXPERIENCE  MEETING 

Like  some  old  deity  restored 
From  all  that  host  the  Greeks  adored. 
He  sits  upon  his  hallowed  ground 
And  hurls  his  thunderbolts  around. 
Sometimes  they  do  no  more  than  play 
Across  the  heavens  far  away, 
As  pyrotechnics  of  the  mind 
Disporting  on  the  passing  wind. 
At  other  times,  as  red  as  Mars, 
They  burst,  disseminating  stars 
And  mental  nigger-shooters  through 
The  night  of  ignorance  and  dew. 
And  still  at  other  times  they  light 
Explosively,  like  dynamite. 
Reducing  fallacies  profound 
To  heaps  of  wreckage  all  around. 

Now,  I  have  seen  him  through  the  span 

Of  some  ten  years,  and  know  him  well. 
He  is  no  god  —  he  is  a  man  — 

And  very  human,  truth  to  tell. 
He  might  still  be  there  for  a  few, 

Disporting  high  among  the  clouds. 
But  all  men  now  must  see  him,  too. 

Since  he  has  hurled  among  us  "  Crowds." 

Clark  Mc Adams  in  St.  Louis  Dispatch. 

From  Rev.  Charles  Raynal  of  North  Carolina  in  the  Land- 
mark: I  recommend  this  book  to  everybody.  The  farmer 
ought  to  read  it;  merchants,  manufacturers,  bankers,  news- 
papers, doctors,  lawyers,  and  preachers  ought  to  read  it. 
Everybody!  Even  folks  that  don't  read  anything  but  the 
nasty  novels  ought  to  read  it.  Businessmen's  associations. 
Church  conferences,  Synods  and  Presbyteries;  State  assem- 
blies; the  Congress  and  cabinet  of  these  United  States;  even 
the  Women's  Book  clubs  ought  to  lay  aside  all  business,  no 
matter  how  important,  and  read  "CROWDS." 

Above  all  things  else  that  Statesville  can  do  right  now  is  to 
read  this  book.  It  presents  a  spirit  that  will  build  our  town 
more  surely  than  money  can,  for  it  shows  money  how  to  work. 
If  everybody  would  get  the  book;  and  then  if  the  City  Fathers 


OF  READERS  OF  CROWDS  599 

would  appoint  a  day;  and  then  if  all  stores  and  factories  and 
everything  would  close  as  they  do  sometimes  for  protracted 
meetings;  and  then  if  we  all  would  just  sit  down  and  read  the 
book,  we  would  all  get  up  the  day  after  and  go  to  work.  And 
we  would  build  Statesville. 

I  say  to  you,  in  all  earnestness  and  conviction,  that  there  is 
more  sense,  and  business,  and  money  in  this  book  than  you  can 
find  elsewhere  on  earth  to-day  in  anything  like  the  same  space. 

It  is  more  interesting  than  any  twenty  novels  of  the  day.  If, 
after  you  have  read  it,  you  want  your  money  back,  I  will  buy 
it  from  you  for  what  you  paid  for  it,  and  give  you  a  bonus  for 
reading  it.  The  Landmark  is  authorized  to  act  for  me  in  this 
matter. 

WHO? 
By  William  Cleaver  Wilkinson 

Pulpit  extravaganzist  uncontrolled. 

As  heady  as  a  wild  ass  racing  free 

And  snuffing  up  the  wind !     So,  scorning  he 
Pathways  by  other  footsteps  beaten,  bold. 
Through  trackless  regions,  over  mountains  old. 

He  ranges  where  his  own  far  footsteps  flee 

All  following,  since  no  mortal  eye  can  see 
How  they  to  any  clear  direction  hold ! 

But  there  at  least  he  thunders  on  in  tread 
As  masterful  as  wayward,  and  no  less 

Unweariable.     And,  strange  thing  to  be  said. 
This  wild-ass  ranger  of  the  wilderness 

From  each  excursion  brings  some  gospel  bread 
Wherewith  the  gaping,  hungering  soul  to  bless ! 

"  Crowds" —  now  in  its  seventh  month  —  still  holds  the  record 
as  America's  best  selling  book  of  non-fiction. 

The  Bookman  record  of  sales  for  January  is  as  follows : 

Crowds.     Lee 

Gitanjali.     Tagore 

Our  Eternity.     Maeterlinck 

The  Promised  Land.    Antin 

Autobiography.     Roosevelt 

Paris  Nights.     Bennett 


BOOKS  BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

The  History  of  a  Visionary  Book 

"Inspired  Millionaires."  A  Study  of  the  Man  of  Genius  in 
Business  was  declined  by  seventeen  publishers  and  printed  by 
the  author.  It  was  immediately  accepted  in  Germany  and  is 
being  translated  into  German  and  into  French,  and  has  been 
received  in  England  (as  Lowes  Dickinson  puts  it)  as  "the  most 
representative  book  that  has  appeared  in  America  for  a  long 
time." 

^  One  of  the  leading  wholesale  houses  of  the  West  has  sent 
"Inspired  Millionaires"  to  a  long  list  of  its  most  important 
customers  as  a  basis  of  mutual  understanding  and  conducting 
business. 

1[  Another  leading  house  has  sent  the  book  to  prospective  in- 
vestors as  an  interpretation  and  expression  of  the  methods  and 
principles  on  which  they  have  achieved  their  success. 
^  A  business  men's  class  to  study  the  principles  and  tendencies 
laid  down  in  the  book  has  been  formed  by  the  proprietor  of  one 
of  the  great  establishments  in  New  York. 
^  An  illustrative  supplement  or  companion  piece  to  the  book 
is  being  written  by  business  men  themselves. 
1[  Used  as  a  textbook  at  Yale    in  the   course   on  National 
Efficiency. 


From  a  letter: 

"...  'Inspired  Millionaires'  strikes  me  as  almost  the 
only  American  book  I  have  read  (outside  Walt  Whitman)  that 
is  really  American,  has  a  '  vision,'  and  that  seems  to  belong  to 
a  new  country  and  civilization.  The  book  is  a  power.  It 
challenges  one  vitally  in  every  page,  and  one  finds  one's  self 
either  agreeing  or  disagreeing  passionately.  This,  I  think,  is 
the  highest  praise  one  can  give  a  book  of  this  kind.     .     .     ." 


BOOKS  BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR  601 

From  a  millionaire: 

Sales  Company,  Pels  Naptha  Soap,  London. 
"  .  .  .  .  If  a  copy  of  the  book  were  placed  in  the  hands 
of  every  man  of  means  in  the  country,  under  the  right  auspices 
so  that  he  would  read  it,  it  would  do  more  to  change  conditions 
than  perhaps  any  other  one  thing.  ...  I  want  twenty- 
five  copies  of  the  book  to  distribute  among  the  millionaires 
here.  If  the  books  are  well  received  I  will  increase  the  order. 
.     ,     .     "  —  Joseph   Fels. 


"     .     .     .     .     Please  send  me  fifty  more  copies.     I  am  put- 
ting them  where  they  tell.    I  enclose  my  check." —  Joseph  Fels. 


"  ....  I  want  a  thousand  more  copies  of  'Inspired 
Millionaires.'  To  be  used  like  the  others.  .  .  .  En- 
closure.    .     .     .     " —  Joseph  Fels. 


The  Voice  of  the  Machines 

An  Introduction  to  the  Twentieth  Century  by 
GERALD  STANLEY  LEE 

Some  of  us  have  wished  for  a  long  time  that  some  one  would 
write  a  book  that  would  answer  Ruskin  and  say  a  good  word 
for  machinery  in  modern  life.  The  machines  are  all  about  us 
and  we  have  wanted  a  book  that  we  could  use,  that  we  could 
get  the  good  of  afterward  in  our  thoughts  every  day,  so  that, 
as  we  go  about,  the  sights  and  sounds  of  streets  and  cities  would 
be  full  of  cheer  to  us.  The  feeling  that  we  have  been  groping 
toward  —  many  of  us  —  and  which  is  in  "The  Voice  of  the 
Machines"  is  something  akin  to  the  love  of  nature,  except  that 
it  is  for  town  use. 

It  is  a  big  book.  Mr.  Lee  is  a  writer  of  great  power  of  ex- 
pression and  of  singular  insight.  His  humor  is  gigantic,  and 
he  has  flashes  of  eloquence  that  not  a  dozen  living  men  can 
rival. —  The  Neiv   York  Evening  Mail. 


602  BOOKS  BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

Here  is  a  book  to  try  our  minds  —  to  see  whether  they  be 
quick  or  dead.  .  .  .  Lee  has  the  happiness,  and  the  un- 
happiness,  of  being  a  man  who  thinks  with  his  senses,  and  feels 
with  intelHgence  —  in  an  age  that  has,  in  the  main,  determined 
to  keep  its  head-business  separate  from  all  affairs  of  the  heart. 
But  Lee's  way  of  working  his  head  and  heart  in  one  circulatory 
system  is  the  way  of  nature  and  sound  physiology;  it  follows 
that  he  is  longer  for  this  world  than  most  of  his  contemporaries. 
The  salt  of  the  earth  will  find  here  a  book  that  is  great  —  simply 
great  —  by  all  the  ultimate  tests  of  greatness.  That  is  to  say, 
it  has  all  the  qualities  of  a  human  character  that  is  exceptionally 
and  astonishingly  sane. —  Kansas  City  Star. 

It  is  tonic  in  every  sentence,  and  it  is  not  the  less  so  for  the 
presence  of  that  vital  humor  that  bubbles  up  in  the  work  of  an 
untrammeled  genius  who  has  a  clear  eye  for  things  as  they  are. 
—  Mail  and  Times. 


Mount  Tom 

AN  ALL  OUTDOORS  MAGAZINE 

Devoted  to  Rest  and  Worship  and  to  a  Little  Look-off  on  the  World 

'Edited  by  Mr.  Lee.     Every  Other  Month.     Six  Numbers,  $1.00. 
Mount  Tom  Press,  Northampton,  Massachusetts. 

The  magazine  is  in  the  form  of  personal  impressions  —  mostly  those  of  the 
editor,  and  is  entirely  written  and  dated  from  the  Mountain.  It  is  supposed 
to  cultivate  those  various  friendly  but  distant  feelings  toward  the  world,  and 
toward  chimneys  and  institutions,  that  a  mountain  gives  one  when  it  has  the 
chance. 


MOST  MEN  WHO  READ  "CROWDS" 
ARE  BUSY  MEN 

They  are  very  largely  men  who  have  made  a  success  of  life 
because  they  know  what  they  are  about  and  know  what  they 
want. 

One  of  the  first  things  a  man  like  this  knows  about  "  Crowds  " 
(561  pages  long)  is  that  he  hasn't  time  to  read  it. 

This  works  very  well  for  a  time. 

Then  he  begins  meeting  other  people  who  knew  they  hadn't 
time  to  read  it. 

He  finds  that  they  are  reading  it. 

They  tell  him  he  ought  to. 

He  says  he  would  be  very  glad  to  read  it  if  they  would  tell 
him  what  the  book  is  about.  Then  he  would  know  whether  he 
wanted  to  read  it  or  not. 

Then  they  begin  to  try  to  tell  him  what  "Crowds"  is  like. 

They  have  a  terrible  time. 

There  may  be  a  very  great  many  things  that  are  the  matter 
with  "Crowds,"  but  none  of  them  are  half  so  bad  as  trying  to 
tell  a  man  who  has  not  read  it  what  "Crowds"  is  like. 

"Crowds  Jr."  has  been  issued  by  the  publishers  as  a  relief 
measure  for  people  who  try  to  tell  what  "Crowds"  is  like. 

It  is  a  small  slip-in  size  and  when  a  man  has  it  in  his  pocket, 
and  a  man  steps  up  to  him  and  asks  him  what  "Crowds"  is 
like,  he  hands  his  "  Crowds  Jr."  out  to  him,  and  in  half  an  hour 
he  knows  whether  he  has  time  to  read  "Crowds"  or  not. 

CROWDS  JR.,  A  Little  Run  Through  Crowds: 

Mostly  things  for  men  in  a  hurry,  from  the  larger  book, 

selected  and  arranged  by  the  author. 

Fifty  cents.     Special  rates  in  quantities. 

DOUBLEDAY,     PaGE     &    Co. 

Garden  City,  N.  Y. 

603 


THE  COUNTRY  LIFE  PRESS 
GARDEN  CITY,  N.  Y. 


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